


So Deep the Water

by themus



Series: Wayworn [1]
Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Animal Attack, Animal Death, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Anxiety Disorder, Biblical Scripture References (Abrahamic Religions), Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death Fix, Childhood Trauma, Crisis of Faith, Death, Developing Friendships, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Enemies to Friends, Explicit Language, Family, Fix-It, Food Issues, Friendship, Gen, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Graphic Description, Graphic Description of Corpses, Heavy Angst, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Sex, Injury, Major Character Injury, Major Illness, Minor Character Death, Natural Disasters, Near Death, Original Character Death(s), Past Abuse, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Religion, Season/Series 01, Slavery, Threats of Violence, Trauma, Vikings, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:27:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 28
Words: 112,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24358804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themus/pseuds/themus
Summary: Laws they made there, and life allottedTo the sons of men, and set their fates.~ Voluspa stanza 20 ~Six weeks after Ragnar Lothbrok’s bloody raid on Lindisfarne, the monk Athelstan is struggling to adjust to a life of bondage in the hostile Norwegian wilderness. Plagued by the terrors of his own mind, the looming threat of Ragnar’s return, and Bjorn’s unrelenting hostility, everyday life is hard enough. But when a new danger arises, Athelstan’s already precarious position becomes perilous and as the risks grow greater, he finds himself entangled ever deeper by an oath that he never wanted to make.Season 1 AU, diverging part way through 1.04 - Trial.
Series: Wayworn [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1758712
Comments: 94
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To my readers,
> 
> In the making of this tale, I have striven always to be true to history and to character first. I have, within the scope of my ability to do so, spent as much time in research as possible in order to maintain accuracy on both of these counts. But, not being a historian or a professional linguist, it is inevitable that there will somewhere be inaccuracies with what is known of the historical narrative. I hope that you will forgive these as unavoidable in the pursuit of what is, foremost, a story told from the heart.
> 
> And to my writing group, 
> 
> I am most humbly indebted to you all for your support in finishing this book, but I owe a special word to Cat, Ian, Jess, Kyle and Matt. For your unrelenting enthusiasm in the face of fatigue, for your love and friendship in the face of snarkiness, for your ideas when I had none, for your commiserations during the hard times, and for your expert use of encouraging memes…
> 
> Thank you,  
> Themus

“There is an owl in the house.”

Athelstan blinks his eyes open, gasping, and the sea recedes into the darkness. At his sides, the rough woollen blankets fold into the palms of his clenching hands, his fingers weighed down by the ebbing paralysis of sleep.

A bewildered, “Yes?” falls out of his mouth before his throat clutches shut again at the half-remembered choke of water, cutting a sharp edge to the end of the word.

Bjorn hovers above, his face a moon. He sets his jaw hard, thins his lips into lines that seem to waver in the dimness as if he is underwater. “Last night, too. Did you think it was a secret?” And he jabs something into the hollow of Athelstan’s throat: the familiar frosted line of a knife blade.

Among the beams above Ragnar's empty bed, the owl beats its wings and settles again, talons rasping at the wood.

Athelstan raises a trembling hand, palm outwards. _Wait_. He shoves himself up with the other, scraping his back up the wall, and catches the back of his head a sharp blow on the overhanging shelf. The unlit lamp shudders in place, and Bjorn presses the knife forward into Athelstan’s now faltering movement, scratching a line through the beading sweat on his skin. Athelstan’s throat spasms and he coughs, muscles twitching around the edge of the blade. His hands jerk upwards towards it.

Bjorn slams a palm into his shoulder, knocking Athelstan back, and hisses, “Touch it and Father will kill you for it.” He leans closer, angling the knife downwards, his forefinger braced against the bolster. The steel flashes moonlight. Behind Bjorn’s curled fingers, a notch of wood is missing from the handle, the edges of the wound healed smooth.

Athelstan sags, his linen nightshirt scuffing the wall at the shoulders, and he hangs there from the point of the blade like a doll losing its straw stuffing. It is the blunt sax, at least.

“It is early,” he says, copying Bjorn’s near whisper. The silence between words is enough to hear the puffing breath of Gyda’s sleep from her bunk at the back of the house and the occasional scritch-scratch of the pine-bough mattress shifting beneath furs.

Bjorn glances that way, pretending to look through the woven partition that blocks Athelstan’s sleeping bench from the main living space, then gives his head a little shake and glares down at Athelstan again. “Do you know what it means? The owl.”

Athelstan takes a shallow, careful breath. “It does not mean anything,” he says, willing his heart to give in its juddering, “it is just a bird.”

A frustrated groan slips through Bjorn’s clenched teeth. “Shut up! It is a sign from the Gods. _They_ are watching the farm, so we can go to Kattegat.”

As if to prove him true, the owl moves again, flitting from one beam to another within the tall framework of the roof. It makes a ghostly white shape in the black space, glaring down at them with piercing, amber eyes.

Almost, Athelstan woke Bjorn to tell him exactly that last night. But then he came to his senses. “Bjorn, we discussed this.”

“We didn't _discuss_ anything,” Bjorn spits, “you just forbade. As if you are allowed to forbid me things! You are a stupid slave.” He flexes his fingers, readjusting his grip on the sax, swiping a sheen of greasy sweat across the side of the blade.

Athelstan gives in to a small, nervous swallow, his throat rolling the knife as a wave rolls a boat. He slumps a little further against the uneven daub wall, nudging that protruding spot up into the nook of his shoulder-blade. “It is a dangerous journey. I cannot keep you safe.”

Bjorn rolls his eyes, locking his jaw even tighter. “ _You_ do not keep anyone safe anywhere. That is _my_ job.”

“Your father left everything in my care. It would not please him to abandon my duty because of a bird. We can await them here, as I said.”

Bjorn’s face twists like a cankered apple. A blue wash of moonlight picks out the corner of his cheekbone, a stripe of his jaw, casting the hollows of his eyes into shadow. He leans more weight on the sax, and the point gouges out a stinging line in the fatty flesh of Athelstan’s throat.

Athelstan’s heart stutters and in the terrible halt between one juddering beat and the next his body turns to stone.

But Bjorn shakes himself and stiffens mid-motion, fingers clenching around the handle of the sax until his knuckles bleed to white, holding the blade firm against Athelstan’s throat. He makes a deep noise of anger - a rumbling that crests into a shout - and he shoves at Athelstan, pushing himself back with the movement and throwing the sax out behind him. It clangs against the wooden shelves above the workbench and falls to the floor. Bjorn rocks his weight back and forth, raising a fist. “You know nothing of what pleases him! I will tell them that you denied me. And then you will be in trouble. Father will beat you for this.”

Athelstan clenches his jaw, releasing a heavy breath through his nose. His stomach rolls, around and around as a boiling sea. “Then he will have to beat me. Go back to bed before you wake your sister.”

Bjorn growls at him, flashing teeth in the darkness, and kicks Athelstan’s bench. The wood shivers and creaks, the movement jolting a flinch through Athelstan’s bones. But Bjorn goes, thumping his way back into his loft bunk at the far end of the longhouse. His bedding rustles for some time before he stills and everything—at last—quietens. Outside, the river laps the shore and the hounds dream of a chase, paws scrabbling at the dust.

Disentangling himself from his blankets, Athelstan slumps forward and drops his head into his hands, fingers fisted in the curls of his hair. He lets out a sharp, shuddering breath. The end of it hitches wetly at the back of his throat, almost a sob. The ghost of another hand is tight against his chest. The phantom of another knife presses into the hollow beneath his jaw.

His tongue was clumsy in his panic that day in the chapel, false around words long unpractised.

“Drepith mer ekki, eggja!” _Do not kill me, please!_ He choked on his remaining pleas like lumps of bone and gristle in his throat. His heart was pounding hard enough to shatter. In the hazy silence, all colours drained to grey except Ragnar’s eyes of treacherous ice and the blood-tipped reflection of the altar on his blade. And Athelstan waited for it to punch through his flesh - up through the fat and muscle of his jaw and tongue, up through the bones of his mouth - with a splintering crunch. Him, a butchered animal and nothing more.

The rest is a part-remembered dream, broken by moments of sharp clarity: a laugh, Cenwulf’s splashing, the sting of salt spray on his face, not much else. Afterwards, though… afterwards he remembered the screams. They followed him here, over the sun-bloodied sea, echoing across the deck of Ragnar’s boat.

Athelstan sits listening to the harsh rasp of his own breath until the air no longer grates through his lungs; until his ears cease ringing with the cries of men long dead. By this time his hands have cramped shut, and he pries them loose of his hair in jerks and spasms. When they release, they begin shaking again, like the shimmering reflection on a wave. He reaches one fumbling hand into the space beneath his storage chest and pulls out the book. _His_ book. It smells of musk and metal, and Athelstan hugs it to himself and dips his head, breathing in the comforting scent of home.

Outside the front door, left open now to the warm summer air, the wolfhounds sprawl together in a shapeless pile of grey fur. They stir when Athelstan creeps past them, yawning and stretching out impossibly long legs, grumbling low in their chests at the disturbance. The younger, Frodi, gets up and lopes after Athelstan down to the river.

The first quickening of the morning dusts the edge of the sky in grey where it meets the silhouette of the surrounding hills, but here in the valley the world is still in shadow. The only brightness is the sprinkled light on the wrinkled water and the sandy shore itself, which cuts an arc of reflected moonlight through the shapeless gloom of boats and trees and buildings.

Athelstan sits down in front of the looming gorse and digs his bare toes down into the frigid sand, ignoring the scrape of root or rock across his calloused heels. Frodi lowers his great, hairy head, sniffing at Athelstan’s face, and then collapses directly on top of his feet, crushing them further into the gritty shore. But his belly is warm, and when Athelstan pats him on the side and scratches his fingers through the coarse fur he is rewarded with a contented huff.

He sighs. “If only your master liked me as much as you do.” Bjorn’s hatred has tainted their every interaction since Ragnar and Lagertha left. His bruised pride has rotted into a seething, open wound. And here Athelstan is, trapped between his oath to Ragnar and the stubborn resistance of Bjorn’s fragile manhood. He rubs Frodi’s ears. “Perhaps you can speak to him on my behalf?” Frodi’s snore rumbles through Athelstan’s feet. “Then again, perhaps not.”

The river washes between its banks, making a soft noise like a mother’s quieting hush. Athelstan breathes it in through an open mouth, but his teeth are chattering, and a low, sick ache lies in the pit of his stomach. Is Ragnar the kind of man to give the choice of two infractions and then punish for whichever Athelstan commits in avoiding the other? He brushes away the scratch of Ragnar's rope from his neck. His week as a packhorse, dragged back and forth over the hills to Kattegat, taught him enough: Ragnar is cold and shrewd, largely indifferent to Athelstan except in how he can be useful, otherwise inscrutable. Unlikely, then, that he will baulk at beating his slave for a bad report, no matter the reason for it. And doubtless that beating will be carefully measured for greatest effect.

Athelstan’s stomach churns at the thought.

He sighs again and clasps his hands around the book in his lap, drifting his thumbs over the leather binding, tracing the raised cross on the front. This one has no treasure cover, unlike the one Ragnar ripped from Eadfrith’s gospels, perhaps that is why he let Athelstan keep it. He opens it, flipping past Saint John’s scrutinising gaze with averted eyes. At his place, he smooths down the velvet-soft vellum with a caress of his palm. His fingers are rough at the tips now and they scrape at the rows of neat-handed Latin. The script is drawn in clean lines of black across the moonlit page, legible - just - to one who knows the words well. But the painted initials ooze their colours out in uneven browns like ugly spots of blood.

Athelstan clears his throat of a lingering sickness and fumbles a beginning through still-quaking teeth. “'Every branch in me that bears not fruit… he takes away and… every branch that bears fruit he purges that—’” Athelstan breaks off with a snap, unable to find the cadence. He tightens his hold on the book, humming a frustrated tone, and his thumb scatters grains of sand beneath the threads of the binding. He brushes at them and reads it again, feeling for the familiar quiet rhythm. But this is no chapel of stone, nor the peaceful silence of attentive brethren. The words lie dead and silent on the page as they have since he crossed the sea, as if God could not follow him into this deep darkness. Could not, or _would_ not.

Frodi snuffles himself awake, gets up and trots a circuit around the gorse, then flops down again, his head thumping onto Athelstan’s lap. The long, drooping hairs of his scruffy moustache cover the page.

“You are interrupting my Office,” Athelstan says, scrubbing Frodi’s favourite place under his jaw. The open leaf folds up partway beneath Frodi’s moving weight, showing a fragment of the next. ‘… _sed tristitia vestra vertetur in gaudium._ _’_ Athelstan smooths it back down and presses the gap shut with his thumb – hard, so that the flesh whitens and begins to tingle. Sorrow he has plenty of, but, “Joy?” He chokes on a pained laugh. What chance of that, here?

Dawn washes across the sky in pale red and blue, and from the stables come the first stirrings of a new day. The fortieth dawn since his last at Lindisfarne and Athelstan must spend it soothing a child’s tantrum in order to keep his skin. And if he cannot, well… sometimes a man must bend if he does not wish to break.

A moth flutters past, late to bed.

“While I am late to my chores.” But Athelstan is thankful to put the book away again, back out of sight beneath his chest, and turn to the familiar mindlessness of his work.

Gyda appears an hour later, her entrance heralded by a jaw-cracking yawn. Blinking sleep from exhaustion-bruised eyes, she wriggles her fingers in a wave.

Athelstan pauses in grinding the barley. His forehead is damp with sweat - it is tedious labour and the heat of the day is rising with the sun. With the sudden quiet, the hens’ clucking chatter drifts in from outside. “You did not sleep well?”

That gets a contemplative hum and a one-shouldered shrug. Gyda peers into the porridge pot, bubbling over the fire. A loop of leather cord drips from the neck of her dress and she stuffs it back down with a familiar, absent movement. “This looks better. Honey?”

He nods, picks at the barley husks in the flour, drops them back in. “That was the last, though. You were woken?”

“I had a dream.” She closes her mouth on the words with a sharp finality. The first wisps of her hazel hair have already shaken loose from her plait and they float about her face, a glinting halo in the shifting sunlight. She pushes them back behind her ear with skinny fingers, smooth and clean from the evening scrubbing. Last night’s stew pot is still on the floor beside the hearth and she lifts it over to the workbench, setting it by Athelstan’s elbow. She stands there, hands wrapped around the metal handle, staring at the contents of the pot as if they hold an answer to a question she has not asked.

Athelstan starts grinding again. “Only,” he raises his voice over the scraping rumble of the quern, “I thought I might have shouted in my sleep again. Disturbed you.” Before Bjorn, before the knife, when the sea was closing over his head. At the thought of it, he chokes again and coughs in the back of his throat.

Gyda’s blue eyes open wide and intent as a cat stalking a mouse. The light coming in through the door casts a shadow of her little pointed face on the wall beside her. She twitches the pot handle back and forth. It squeaks, another thing Athelstan needs to mend. “Did it mean something?”

“My dream?” Him amid a stormy sea, a black and choking death. He is afraid, that is what it means. But he shakes his head. “Sometimes, dreams are only dreams.”

Gyda stands silent for some long moments, squeaking the handle. Then she takes a sharp breath and straightens, pushing her shoulders back, a warrior going into battle. She leans over the workbench, twisting her spine like a snake to keep out of the way of his arms, and dips her finger into the flour in the quern’s wooden tray. She draws out two scruffy runes.

“You do not wish to eat first?” Athelstan says, but his shoulders ache and he stops and examines them anyway, resting his arms across the rough top of the stone.

Gyda neatens the lines - one upright stroke, then another like an arrow pointed to the sky - and dusts the flour from her hand back into the tray. _Iss, tyr_.

He fidgets with his tunic sleeve, tugging at the ragged cuff, itching it up and down around his wrist. The tunic is an old one of Ragnar’s, his trousers and shoes too, and Athelstan is swimming in the extra linen; a child wearing a man’s cloak. And he is a child, compared to Ragnar.

“Stop that.” Gyda plucks at the threadbare elbow and waits for him to settle into stillness. “You said you wanted to practise. Consider it one of your morning chores.”

“You are a hard mistress.”

Gyda leans her hip against the workbench, crossing her arms. “Mother says people do not learn if they are not pushed. And you are my best…” she frowns, forehead pulled too tight at the seams, “… _skoe-uller_?”

Athelstan narrowly quashes a smile at her wreckage of the English. “ _Scholar_. I try.” He studies the word again. “Provoke? Endless movement?” He rolls an aching shoulder in an exaggerated circle, raises an eyebrow at her. “Is this why I must always do the grinding now, Gyda?”

She ignores that, nodding again towards the word she has written. Athelstan’s close breaths drift a soft covering of flour across it, like scudding snow. “Eat.” Gyda over-enunciates it, spitting out the sharpened ‘tuh’ as a man does with a stubborn horse, as Bjorn does with the hounds when they are pretending not to hear him. Athelstan’s stomach rumbles in cruel betrayal and Gyda’s expression narrows, her eyes and mouth slitted.

He drops his eyes, grimacing, smooths the flour back over and with a steady, practised hand he crams a long line of runes into the small, angular space. He forms the _fe_ and the _yr_ in the English way: the first without the turn in the upstrokes, the second with its sloping curve encasing the crossed lines, like the strung bow that it represents. ‘ _Forgive me._ _’_

Gyda’s lips curl up at the corners, though she shakes her head at him. “Good. Except this.” She stretches over Athelstan’s arm and scrubs out a _reidh_ , over-balances and catches at the edge of the workbench with her other hand. She is up on tiptoes, stiff as a beam against a post, chewing her bottom lip. Her shadow grows across the workbench and up the wall. It looks back down over her, the bowed head of a benevolent saint, not seeming to mind her writing on its skirts.

“There. Now eat, or I will not tell you later why it was wrong.” She thumps her heels back down and tosses him the remaining hunk of bread from the other end of the bench. Athelstan grunts in surprise, fumbling the catch and dropping it in the flour. Gyda grabs a spoon from the shelves and taps the stew pot with it on her way back past him. It rings out - a dull, muffled echo similar to the one the sax made when Bjorn threw it. Athelstan glances over to where it landed, though it is not there now, someone has put it back on the stone shelf by Ragnar’s bed.

Gyda hums to herself, hunched over a steaming bowl at the table. She takes her time stirring the porridge around, making patterns and patting it flat again and the hum resolves itself into a breathy tune. It is not a song of any real kind; her voice plucks at notes aimlessly, like a wild, chasing wind. The steam curls up around Gyda’s face, leaving a sheen on her forehead and pulling up bright patches of red on her pale cheeks. She mumbles something around a mouthful of food, her shoulders pulled up in a protective half-shrug.

Athelstan repeats the sounds in his mind until he manages to pull them apart into words. “How long is the voyage?” He waits for her affirming nod. “It took us five days, though we had some days becalmed. It would depend on the wind.” He leans back against the workbench, scraping out the cold cabbage stew with the bread. It stinks of seaweed, the kind that has been washed up from the ocean and baked dry by the sun. Athelstan picks off a lump of rabbit meat and drops it back in the pot, then bites a mouthful of the rest, though his rolling stomach protests - as usual - that it does not wish to eat. “I am sure they are safe. Your father is a clever man.” And as he speaks, he finds he is sure. Ragnar is not a man that death can take easily.

Gyda chews on her lip, leaving red, raw marks. “Could you… when you next speak to your Christ God, could you ask a blessing for them? To come home safely?”

Athelstan drops his gaze, tightening his hold on the pot. Ragnar and Lagertha are out there somewhere on the same sea that Athelstan crossed in fetters, on that same boat with the blood-red sails. How many more atrocities has Ragnar allowed at Hexham? The blood they all have on their hands now… he should be calling for divine judgement on them.

But he cannot pray for children to become orphans.

One end of the bread is crushed flat in his fist. Athelstan pries it from his fingers and begins picking it apart. “Of course,” he says, though his heart twists and he chokes down hot shame at his betrayal. “Of course I will.”

And Gyda’s face blossoms, lips widening into a tentative grin, freckled nose scrunching up like a rabbit scenting the air. “Would you ask now, also?”

“I… yes,” he stutters. What other answer can he give? He swallows, taking the moment to find the Latin and slip into it. “Deus, qui vis mortem peccatoris, _”_ and thankfully this time the tones roll from his tongue with practised fluency, _“_ caelesti protegas benignus auxilio _…”_

Gyda folds her hands in imitation of his, fingers intertwined, her mouth drawn down in excessive solemnity. The effect is ruined by the presence of the porridge spoon still clutched between her hands, an oaty lump slowly sliding down it, unnoticed.

“That sounds nice,” she says, as soon as the short litany is done and Athelstan raises his head. “What does it—”

“What was _that_?”

Athelstan tenses and Gyda startles, flicking oats across the table. Bjorn is only half-dressed, still in his nightshirt with just his trousers pulled on underneath, bright blonde hair sticking up in every direction. Usually, Gyda would make fun of him, but his face is battle-fierce and she jerks bolt upright, sucking her breath in between her teeth.

Heat bursts through Athelstan’s chest. Anger, at Bjorn… no, at himself. How could he so quickly forget to be careful?

“What was that?” Bjorn’s voice is threatening in its quietness. Like father, like son.

A shiver runs up Athelstan’s spine. He clasps a hand to the back of his neck, digs his fingers under his hair at the nape. There is a patch of shiny new skin there, smooth as glass and no bigger around than the end of a candle.

Bjorn is still glaring, his fists clenched into white balls. “Gyda? What did you just have him do?”

Gyda gapes at him. Her teeth clack together several times before words finally burst out. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

“We already sacrificed to Thor. We do not need his useless dead god.” Bjorn spits the last out, shooting Athelstan a venomous glare, then spits again at his feet for good measure. His hatred sits on the floorboards, foaming.

Athelstan freezes in place, slackens his face into a blank mask. His fingers press so hard against his neck that a headache begins to form, slipping sharp pains up through the back of his skull. He keeps silent.

Gyda shakes her head. “It is just another God. What is the harm?”

“His stupid god could not even save him from Father - a _man_. What use would he be against Rán? Against the sea? Anything?”

She shrugs limp shoulders and looks away, hair falling in soft wings over her face. Gyda spears her spoon into her bowl.

Bjorn rounds on Athelstan, striding forward and pointing a finger in his face. “You will stop filling her mind with all this nonsense. We have our own Gods here, powerful Gods. We do not want your snivelling weakling.” Bjorn’s fingernails are dirty. His collarbone is smudged brown with dust because Athelstan could not convince him to wash before bed last night. How could Ragnar ever expect him to have any control here?

He lowers his gaze from Bjorn’s trembling hand, breaking out of his stillness to wipe the sweat from his own. These, his master’s clothes, this unfamiliar nut-brown skin. He rubs his thumb along the side of his finger - gone are the callouses on his writing hand, a mark on him of words of freedom, now his skin is hardened by slavery. How much he has changed in just six weeks, yet he is just as small and insignificant in the face of Ragnar’s return as he was on the cramped deck of his boat in the middle of a vast and empty sea.


	2. Chapter 2

At this early hour, the pigs are gathered in their wallow deep in the woods behind the longhouse. They lie sleeping in the shaded furrows, fat bellies slopped with mud. The air stinks of fetid water and excrement. Athelstan turns his head aside at the smell, slits his eyes against a cloud of biting midges and dumps the bucket of kitchen scraps out where the grass ends. Making an abrupt turn, his face pressed to his shoulder to scrub away the pinching itch of the insects on his forehead, Athelstan hastens round a tree and trips over a pair of legs. He flails with both hands, dropping the bucket, and catches himself on an overhanging branch.

“Uxi,” he says, breathless, his heart thumping from the shock of the fall. “Hiding from your work again, I see.” He rights himself and brushes bark from his grazed palm.

Uxi sprawls on his belly in the grass, rolling a leather ball back and forth between his hands. His feet churn uncontrolled loops in the air. Athelstan drops down on his haunches and rubs at his shin where he took the full force of a bony heel in mid-swing. His utility knife presses up beneath his ribs and he lets go of his leg to tuck the short handle down out of the way.

Below the mop of unruly brown curls, Uxi’s expression is wrinkled impishness, his grin carving huge dimples out of youth-fattened cheeks. “I did some,” he says, high-pitched in protest, stretching up on his elbows and giving the impression of an alarmed hare. “I gave the day-meal to my pig. Did you see how fat he is?” Here he drops his ball and demonstrates the width of his animal with wide-stretched arms, doubling the size of the poor creature. His position now is faintly seal-like.

“I did at that.” Athelstan gives a curt nod, though he fails in keeping his smile completely buried. Authny’s face would be a sight to see on finding that her youngest son has absconded with the morning stew. He gets back to his feet - acorns crunching into the ground beneath his shoes - and picks up his bucket again, choosing a careful path between the tumbled hillocks of stretching oak roots. The grass is grey in the morning's duskiness, covered in a heavy blanket of silver dew, and Athelstan’s shoes are dark with a cold damp that is beginning to seep through to his toes. On his belt, the house keys jangle on their iron ring, knocking against the knife's little sheath and making his steps musical.

Uxi scrambles to his feet and follows at a pattering pace. The pigs’ snuffling fades behind them. “Mother says I can go fishing with the men today. Is Bjorn coming?”

“You would have to ask him.”

“I will.” He shrugs and continues to hang by Athelstan’s elbow, tapping the bucket so that it swings between them. “We are going upriver.” _Tap_. “Father hopes for salmon. Mother says he is wasting his time, the fishing is too poor this year.” _Tap_. The rope handle is rough, scratching another layer of skin from Athelstan’s grazed palm as it goes back and forth, back and forth. “She says he ought to stay back and fix the fence in the sheepfold.” Uxi squints through his hair. “But who wants to fix fences when they can fish?”

“Who wants to bring in the firewood when they can explore?” Athelstan asks, letting his tone stray into pointedness, and Uxi raises his face to grin up at him again, showing off a chin smeared with berry juice. Athelstan endeavours to look stern. "A lovely chiding you will return to if you do not get it done."

"Probably," Uxi says, and sniffs, as if Authny’s scoldings are not commonly known as things of awe and wonder. “But farm work is boring.” He pretends to gag, sticking out a wide red tongue. “I will not be a farmer anyway. I will go on adventures.”

Bjorn would likely say the same. He has been wound tight all these weeks with frustration at being left behind, at being called a man but not considered enough of one to go where the men go. Ragnar must have known how he would react. Was that the point of it? As some sort of test? One which Athelstan is failing.

“You will go raiding?” he asks, ducking beneath a low oak branch.

Uxi gives a single jerking shake of his head, his curls sliding this way and that like badly stowed baggage. "Uh-uh. I want to explore. I will go west and west and find new lands until I come to the edge of the world," he says, with simple confidence that declares that the whole idea is indeed a simple one.

“But it is not—” Athelstan clamps his mouth shut, swallowing down the correction, though the truth sticks in his throat like a burr.

“Not what?”

“No, nothing.” Gyda’s panicked inference that her parents might fall from the bottom of a round world is… not something that Athelstan wishes to repeat.

The sun slips up from behind the hills at last, casting a beam of hot yellow between the trees to land across Uxi’s face. He squints and wrinkles his nose in response, then puts up a hand to shield his eyes. On his sleeve hem, the decorative braid ia coming undone and Uxi catches at the loose end and picks at it, stumbling along unaware of his own feet. Athelstan slows his steps to match Uxi’s meandering pace and swaps the bucket to his other hand, in case catching is required.

“I got up to the top of the ridge today.” Uxi teases the braid out stitch by stitch with sharp fingernails until it hangs - a bright new twist of yellow and blue - against the small bone of his wrist. “And I saw a wolf. An alive one.”

“On the ridge? Alone?” Athelstan stops and frowns up behind them at the brow of the hill which teases a blue line of bare grass between the tops of the trees. The sheep, all except the new ewes quarantined in the fold, roam free up there on the heft. Athelstan takes a deep breath of the stifling air. A wolf would cause chaos.

“No, on the one behind, heading west.”

“Is that usual?” He looks down again at Uxi, but the top of his head gives no clues except that Uxi shakes it again, causing another cascade of curls.

“Not in the summer.”

Athelstan considers that information. Away is better than towards, he assumes. So, unless Vakr chooses to deal with it, “I will tell Ragnar when he returns.”

Uxi hums a response.

When they pass the henhouse, the little door is open and the birds are strutting around in the grass, searching for insects. They scatter around Athelstan’s wading feet, raising an indignant noise at his ungainly intrusion. Their plump bodies bob atop thin legs and with their colourful wings spread about them, they look like a bustling crowd of noblewomen in rich, heavy skirts. After he has passed, they circle back around, nagging for food.

“You will have to hunt your own, ladies,” Athelstan says, shooing them across the yard towards the open garden gate where the bean plants are sagging from their poles, their leaves about as solid as a fishing net. “There are beetles aplenty if you look.” He drops the bucket in the front porch of the longhouse.

From the little wattle stable, comes the familiar call and response of Gyda’s morning milking and Athelstan stops to listen. Her half at least is some strange corruption of Norse, the not-quite-nonsense words that mothers use with young children, but that is as far as Athelstan has been able to interpret. The goats bleat back at her, though in a manner somewhat softer than the excited urgency with which they address Bjorn - whom they hate - and Athelstan - whom they tolerate with fewer kicks every day. Gyda scratches the goats’ butting heads, murmuring at them, and smiles at Athelstan over the top of the stable gate. “Will you come and help? You owe me a story.”

“I would like to,” he says, “but I believe I have a fence to mend.”

“Before the ewes get out,” Uxi adds in from the other side of the stable wall, his voice small and muffled by his crouched position - folded up with his knees by his ears - combing his fingers through the dew-wet grass. He finds a slug and throws it into the dusty yard where it lands with a sloppy thud. “Mother says she will cut Father’s balls off with a rusty knife if they do. They cost us all of last year’s fleeces.”

Gyda’s smile turns to a frown quick as lightning and she retreats inside the stable, calling out, “Do you not have work to do, Uxi?” She shrugs several times while she speaks as if she cannot quite settle her bones inside her skin.

“I am working. I am feeding the chickens.” Uxi throws another slug into the yard - it bounces - and he scratches the back of his head with the resultantly slimy fingers. “Are you coming fishing with us, Gyda?”

Gyda stiffens even further. “I—” One goat bleats for attention by the milking stool and Gyda turns towards it with a sigh, the tightness bleeding out of her shoulders. “I have too much to do,” she finishes, tripping over her words in her haste to get them out. “Ask Bjorn, he will go.”

Uxi throws another slug, which splashes into the tub of water in the middle of the yard, shocking a nearby hen into a brief attempt at flight.

“That is my washing water!” Gyda complains. But Uxi is away across the yard, casting a perfunctory farewell over his shoulder, and is swallowed by the shadow of the longhouse door.

***

Athelstan does not take the direct path to the sheepfold. Past Lagertha’s garden the lone alder stands guard at the edge of the shore, bowing its lower branches into the water. The river slips south-eastwards then, and Athelstan follows it along the sand. From behind comes the distant bustle of the faerings being readied, the thud and clatter of nets and traps being loaded, and a short disagreement between Bjorn and one of the other boys. By then Athelstan is past the other longhouses and the river twists again, running directly towards the rising sun. Here is peace, of a kind. A pair of jays shriek to each other in the crest of an oak tree and the sand rises - rustling - around Athelstan’s shoes. And if he treads a little more deeply than necessary, if he closes his eyes and soaks in the familiar push and pull weight of it, imagining himself under a different sky, well, there is no one there to see. But the sand peters away after a short time, drawing back into the grass. Across the river, the sand's sweeping arc is reflected in a pebbled bay which bites out into the water, coming to a stop at a tall, protruding bank. There an ash tree hangs, its roots forming a twisted web in the air. Slowly and surely the river is carving itself a straighter path beneath it and to the sea.

And it cannot be so very far, beyond the encompassing hills. It will be no distance at all by boat. He could take one of the faerings tonight while the children are asleep before Ragnar returns and his chance is lost. The vessels are small but well-made, he could survive the voyage with a good wind and a calm sea.

Athelstan paints the picture in his mind: the salt and the water, the hazy blue line of land on the horizon, the golden shores and the punch of crushing relief in his gut at stepping out onto the sands of home. Then, a small and quiet cell in a little inland priory, hidden in the woods far from the sea and him by the fire there, wrinkled and old and warm and free. And all of this nothing but a hazy, unpleasant remembering.

A fly buzzes around his face and Athelstan jerks his head, lifting one shoulder to rub away the tickling sensation of wings on his ear. He chokes a small laugh past the lump in his throat. It is a ridiculous pretence, he would never make it around the coast to the mouth of Kattegat's narrow fjord, let alone far past that to the open sea. He is surrounded by vast wilderness and yet he is no less trapped than if he were within a cage. It is just that his cage is built of trees and rivers and hills, of fear and of duty.

Away to his right, the ewes are bleating in their fold. There are fences to mend, farm work to do, a master to please.

Athelstan drops his eyes from the horizon and clambers up the bank. It is a small fold, laid mostly to grass and cleared of the tangled trees that fill the rest of the space between the buildings and the slope of the hill behind. Here and there an oak stump peeks up above the sun-withered grass, the once bright heartwood now grey and fissured. Some are as wide as a man’s reach from one side to another and in the cracked centre of one tall stump, a willowherb has seeded itself, sending up a single towering stalk topped with columns of delicate, rosy flowers.

The ruined hurdle sits in a front corner of the fold, hidden beneath the overhanging branches of an apple tree in the orchard beside. Its roots have disturbed the stakes, while a clambering ivy - grown vigorous in the small spot of deep shade - has crested over it and into the fold, twining dozens of questing spears through the weavers. Now the hurdle leans outwards, weighed down by the heap of dark, waxy leaves.

Ragnar's ewe is nosing at the gap now, pushing her shorn, black head through and nibbling at a cluster of dandelions. Athelstan pulls up a handful of them and tosses them into the fold, nudging the ewe's head back until she goes. "You will be out with the others soon enough, so long as you pass inspection," he tells her flicking ear. "Have some patience." Her breath puffs out warm and moist on his wrist. She does not seem inclined to join Vakr’s two white ewes, working their way in a steady amble along the hillside fence, clearing the scorched grass of clover. Instead, she noses about the hurdle while Athelstan sets to work tearing out the ivy.

Already, the sun has cast away the early morning shadows from the periwinkle sky and it burns like a near fire on Athelstan’s back. “So much for those summer rains, Gyda,” he mutters, tugging at a stubborn stem. His hands are slick with sweat, slippery around the tough ropes of ivy, red and itchy from the milky sap. This stem is twined all around one stake, and Athelstan’s foot slides across the ground - baked solid by the sun - and kicks up a cloud of dust from the path. He pauses to scrub the stinging sweat from his forehead with a grimy sleeve and something scratches in his throat, a sharp irritation. He coughs and swallows, but it remains a stubborn catch deep in the back behind his tongue. The stake, in a slow reaction to Athelstan's tugging, slumps further outwards with a grinding creak against the hard soil. And with that, the hurdle twists past its breaking point and several of the weavers snap into pieces, grinding against each other beneath the ivy like shattered bone beneath skin.

Athelstan steps back and takes in the sagging mess with a frown. "Well, there is no repairing that," he says and heaves a breath of hot, sticky air. Use of the hand-axe is out of the question unless he wishes to try for a hanging, but he can build a dead hedge up against the falling hurdle and keep the animal in that way. And that is the best he will manage unless Bjorn sees fit to help a slave with his work. For a long time, he laughs at himself for even thinking it.

The river remains an empty, serene blue all that morning while Athelstan works, cutting brash to size with his utility knife and sharpening sticks into stakes. When he returns to the sheepfold for the final time, dragging a last load of wood behind him, some of the women are in the orchard. Among the low branches of the apple trees, their skirts flash pieces of unexpected colour - vivid blue and orange and yellow. At the front of the orchard, Authny frowns up at the wilted crown of a larger tree. She rubs a burnt leaf between her fingers and pulls the branch this way and that counting, perhaps, the sparse blossoms. The main harvest looks set to be a dismal one, though the early-cropping crab apple trees have covered the ground in a bright blanket of small, sour fruit.

Athelstan’s steps slow. He glances around for Gyda, but she is not here, and a thrill of nerves jolts up his spine. He could come back later when they are gone.

But then Authny looks around, and her plump face tightens and twists. “ _There_ you are.”

Athelstan misses his footing, kicks his toes into the firm ground and trips a few steps along the path. He averts his eyes and Authny sighs, heavy with exasperation. He looks up at her, down again, then compromises by keeping his head ducked and looking at her sidelong. He stands motionless in the middle of the path, hands sweaty around his bundle of brash, face flaming.

Authny shakes her head and quirks an eyebrow almost up into her greying russet hair. “I do not know what Ragnar was thinking bringing this one home,” she mutters. “Well? Get back to work.”

Athelstan ducks his head in obeisance and climbs through into the sheepfold to begin setting the new stakes into two tight rows.

“He works hard enough, I suppose,” Authny says in loud observation, after a long time of quiet apart from Athelstan’s hammering. She examines a fallen apple, lips pursed, eyes flat, then places it into the basket on her ample hip and sweeps the same critical eye across him from the other side of the orchard fence. But he is a flawed fruit, and she sniffs out her judgement of him. He fidgets under her scrutiny, wriggling the top of the final stake for something to do, then tugging at the cuff of his tunic sleeve where it has slipped up over his wrist. After so long spent drowning in his monk’s habit, a single layer of thin linen feels very much like nakedness.

Authny looks over her shoulder to one of the other women. “I do not know why Ragnar could not buy one from the market like everyone else,” Authny tells her. “He could have got one with more flesh on his bones. One that speaks, maybe.”

The younger woman - Rannveyg - puffs out a soft laugh. “Have you seen the sour-faced lumps the traders bring to Kattegat? Always missing half their teeth. Who wants to look at that all day?” She gives Athelstan a wide, smirking smile. The front tresses of her black hair are caught up in a complicated twist, but the rest falls in long waves over her shoulders, the ends damp and tangled.

“ _You_ should not be looking at anyone all day.”

“He is a slave, it hardly counts.”

Authny levels Rannveyg with a stern look. “You have a farm to tend. And a _husband_.”

Rannveyg shrugs the words away and twists an apple from the branch of one of the smaller trees. It pops off, and the branch bounces, rustling. “The fearless Kauko? Who eats all my food, tells me to hurry getting pregnant and leaves again? Does this sound like this thing you call a husband?”

“Oh, be thankful, girl. Husbands only cause more trouble when they stay home. Eight sons I have given to mine. Eight. And still every day he wants his prick wet to make a ninth. I do not care about the Gods’ sacred numbers, I tell him, I have work to do and no time at my age for another bawling mouth, but he insists. You will see how it is when you get with child.”

Rannveyg’s mouth sets in a hard line. “Will I?” The words have a brittle edge and Authny’s eyes flick towards her, sharp as a blade. But Rannveyg’s back is to her now.

The black ewe bumps into Athelstan’s leg and pushes her head past the stake. Athelstan lets go of it and drives his knee into her shoulder, but she squeezes past him, past the half-filled skeleton of the new dead hedge, and steps up onto the broken remains of the hurdle. It grates, threatening, under her weight. Athelstan snorts out a noise of frustration and leans through behind her, putting a hand under her jaw and pulling her head back, gentle but firm, steering her back into the fold. She bleats, twists and bites down hard on the meat of his thumb. Surprised, he yelps, snatching his hand back and shaking it.

“Best get hold of her,” Authny says, voice raised and stern. “If you lose her, I doubt you will be lying on your back again before winter.”

“No need to be on his back,” Rannveyg laughs, “there are plenty of other ways they can keep him busy in bed.”

Athelstan’s fingers go numb.

That first night, with Ragnar and Lagertha both half-naked and already stinking of sweat and sex, the noise of their long lovemaking was still repeating in his ears when they came to drag him into it.

“I do not—” He chokes on a whistling breath. He wants to keep his vows, to observe the Office, to sing the Nunc Dimittis again in the chapel where the evening light streams through the leaded windows. But it is not God and Father Cuthbert he answers to here, it is Ragnar. And Ragnar has no care for Athelstan’s vows, or the Rule, or the commandments of God. And Ragnar has no reason at all to accept ‘I do not want to’ if it does not suit him to do so.

The ewe leans further out, stretching her neck towards some rambling buttercups. The hurdle creaks with the shrill desperation of a tree giving way to a storm and falls the rest of the way with a crash, tipping her off into the dirt.

Athelstan startles back, and his sudden movement startles the ewe in return. She finds her feet in a panic of swirling legs and bolts away up the path towards the longhouses. Athelstan stares after her in impotent hopelessness, resting his shaking hands on his thighs. Nothing has gone right these past few days, not since his first argument with Bjorn about Kattegat. Somewhere along the way, he has taken the wrong path and every step further down it just gets him deeper into trouble. But it is too late now to go back and change anything.


	3. Chapter 3

“Sheep are never happy in life until they find a way to leave it,” Brother Osbhert used to complain, and always with a tilt of his bow lips into a half-smile, half-frown. “Fragile creatures, they are. Apt to drop dead with the least cause, or with no seeming cause at all.” And he would pull his straw hat down over his eyes and strike open the western gate with his wooden crook, sandals slapping the sandy dirt as he stepped through it. “It will be no wonder to me if one of these days they pour themselves into the sea.”

And when one night the flock contrived instead to stuff themselves one by one through a small gap in a well cover, Osbhert was the only one unsurprised. “I wonder if Father Cuthbert could be convinced to keep goats instead?” he sighed, fanning his hat at the wailing novice who had discovered the drowned animals stacked up inside.

“And what would you do with this one, Osbhert?” Athelstan mutters now, edging his way across the path in a series of small, sideways steps, into the shade beneath the trees. The ewe, nibbling the yellow flowers from the gorse on the other side, turns her head and studies him with one large, golden eye. He takes a breath and stills, relaxing his shoulders, letting his hands fall open, settling his half-raised foot to the ground. As he moves, the spines of a sow thistle scratch across the heel of his shoe. It is only a small noise, but the ewe’s eye grows wide and, with a little skittering jump, she trots on again. Her hooves kick up a billowing trail of dust.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Athelstan follows her, keeping his feet in the small patch of shade at the side of the path where the grass is cool on the worn leather soles of his shoes. Dust sticks to sweat and becomes a gritty paste on his face and arms. He swallows with a dry throat and fat tongue, suppressing a tickling cough. Between the heat of the day and the stress of Athelstan’s slow chase, the ewe is panting now, her sides heaving, and her mouth flecked with foam. But as the path sweeps left beneath the trees, she slows again and the _click-clack_ of her hooves softens, her feet thumping instead along a rich brown mulch that winds back past the other longhouses and into Ragnar’s yard. At the combined disturbance of their footsteps, a cool, earthy perfume rises out of the ground. Athelstan peels his sticky tunic from the sweat-damp skin of his neck and flaps the linen in a vain attempt to capture anything but sticky air.

In the yard ahead, visible now past the cobbled structure of the tanning racks, the hens chatter and Gyda’s small head bobs into view above the garden gate. She leans sideways over it, her hair dripping down the outside in a hazel waterfall, peering upriver where two white dots in the distance mark the returning faerings.

The ewe pauses her progress at the racks, examining the drying leather from the path, ears flicking at the disturbing presence of a fly. Athelstan's heart has settled now, out of erratic panic into a proper metre, and he rolls his stiff shoulders. Another few steps and the ewe will emerge into the fenced square, with the hounds in the porch and Gyda close at hand. The ewe, oblivious to this certain fate, lifts a leg as if to continue. Athelstan tenses to move after her, but she freezes, holding her foot suspended for a moment in the air, the toes of her hoof pointing an arrow at the ground. Then she makes a sudden, swift change of course, trotting past the racks and disappearing into a small gap in the gorse that bounds the sandy shore.

His stomach flip-flopping, Athelstan hurries after her. He fumbles to unthread his belt from the buckle, tripping over the foot of a rack and hopping back to balance, toes throbbing. He strips off keys and knife and drops them there in the dirt where they bounce away somewhere behind him. With the belt gripped in his fist, he finishes his crossing at a jog and dives into the gorse.

It is a close space, crawling beneath the vaulted arms of long, vicious spikes. The gorse claws at him, at his skin and hair and clothes, gouging out lines of pain so numerous that they all meld into one. They catch at the ewe also, tangling up in her coarse, black wool, slowing her scrambling progress through the bushes. And at Athelstan's sudden, crashing presence behind her, she panics and screams. The noise pulses through Athelstan's head and down into the base of his skull. He squeezes his eyes almost shut and pushes himself to one side of her hind legs, which she stomps now in wild abandon, flicking warm sand up into Athelstan's face. Sputtering, he throws his arm around her neck. She utters an inhuman screech of terror then, her eyes rolling to white, and begins to buck and thrash against his grip. There is no escape from her violent desperation in these close quarters. Her kicking knocks him off-balance and he slips down onto his back, almost beneath her, his fist closed on a handful of her saggy skin, holding on as a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. Inevitably, one of her jabbing feet catches him a glancing blow across his hip and sinks into his stomach with a sickening force that hollows him out.

He coughs hard and swallows back the feeling that not just the contents of his stomach, but the slippery bag of the stomach itself is trying to escape up his throat. But, tightening his grip, he manages at last to slip the belt around the ewe’s neck and with blood-slicked, fumbling fingers he threads the buckle and pushes the prong through. He sends up a quick prayer of thanks that at one time Bjorn was a child small enough to require such a close fitting and grasps at the ample leftover end of the strap just as the ewe breaks through the other side of the gorse and out onto the shore. He is dragged out after her, stumble-crawling with one bloody hand and knee, scraping a messy furrow across the shore to the water, where the ewe stops and drops her head for a long drink.

Athelstan collapses on his back in the burning sand. Overhead, the sun turns his vision white behind closed eyelids and he throws a protective arm over his face. Blood trickles down from elbow to wrist and drips, tickling, into the shell of his ear. His body is a collection of aches and pains, and a revolving nausea sits in the tender space between his ribs and groin.

And here, while he is still regaining his breath, come soft, slipping footsteps from the direction of the orchard. His heart sinks. Sighing, Athelstan cracks his eyes open to look, sand and dust crusted to his eyelashes, and his head spins, twirling the cloudless sky in endless circles. The sticky weight of his tongue rasps against the roof of his mouth.

“I don’t know what Ragnar was thinking,” Authny says again, casting her words back over her shoulder to the other women, “I begin to wonder if the English even have sheep. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.” Her steps are deep and heavy with the weight of the full basket she carries and the sand moulds into valleys and mountains as she goes.

Rannveyg laughs and stops at Athelstan’s feet, letting the rest of the women pass on ahead, which they do with various dismissive looks or none, tramping across the shore to the sandy spit near the alder tree. Rannveyg throws an apple from her own basket to the ewe, who meanders over and takes a bite, jerking the make-shift leash in Athelstan’s hand. “We finished packing the dead hedge before we left, so at least Vakr’s ewes are safe enough.” She throws another apple to Athelstan and it thuds on his chest and rolls off into the sand. “If you can ever get this one back that may be the last you hear about it.”

Athelstan shoves himself up with one hand. The sand is a glaring yellow and with squinted eyes he picks out the small red-green shape of the apple in it. He palms it, slides his thumb over the smooth, waxy skin and dips it into the shallow edge of the river. The cold bites his fingers, and the apple’s skin carries the chill with it when he eats, the flesh parting with a loud crunch. Athelstan savours each sour mouthful, letting the juices wash around the inside of his mouth, around his sticky tongue, down the back of his parched throat. A few stubborn grains of sand grit between his teeth.

“You are lucky that she is none the worse for it.” Rannveyg steps closer, the damp hem of her skirts brushing the tops of the sandy ridges. “You though… you are too much a snake belly, easily wounded. You might do with growing some thicker skin.” Her tone is harsh and her expression severe, but when she reaches out and combs her fingers through his hair, her touch is gentle. Her short nails catch on tangled curls and she teases them gently straight and ruffles the shorter crop at the crown of his head, her lips slipping on a wistful, pained smile. Athelstan jerks away, wincing, tightening his hold on leash and apple so that he won’t succumb to the itching need to smooth her touch from his skin.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she says now, too blunt to be an apology - and who would apologise to a slave? - drawing her hand back. “You might learn that, too.”

Perhaps another man would hurry to defend his masculinity, but it would be a lie if he did. He _is_ afraid, he has been since Brother Fildas came running from the beach - his sandals slipping and sliding on the sandy dunes - with an alarmed cry of, “Raiders!” Often it is evident to him only through the ceaseless churning in his gut, or the way his heart startles at noises that never used to bother him, or on those days where he feels always on the edge of some submerged panic. But fear is his constant companion nonetheless. He is weak, among a people who despise weakness. There is no use in pretending otherwise.

A breeze quickens, pulsing the river’s cooler air across Athelstan’s bare arms, raising up a swathe of goosebumps and lighting a stinging pain on his gouged skin. The air has been still for so long that it seems not to know where to go now that it has started, changing its direction just as abruptly, rippling the water’s skin and bringing with it the first high notes of a scream.

The shore disappears into the swirling, twisting haze of fear. Athelstan’s heart thunders in his head. He scrambles up, clawing at the sand to gain his feet faster, and is halfway back across the shore towards Lagertha’s garden when Bjorn appears in a sprint from Authny’s yard. He takes a climbing leap over the fence without a break in his stride, trips on landing, regains himself and runs again, sand flying from his feet like ocean spray. Bjorn’s blonde hair spikes out in all directions, his tunic - pulled half out of his belt - flaps agape over the rosy softness of his stomach.

At the end of the sandy spit, the women freeze in place, so still that they could be carved from stone, a picture of terror caught mid-motion. Authny - crouched over at the edge of the water, her basket of apples tilted into the flow - breaks out first. She bolts straight, abandoning her basket - which drops upright with a thud - and shoves through the shocked statues of the other women towards Bjorn. She grabs at him with both hands, bringing him to a violent halt that raises a cloud of sand and punches the breath out of him. Her hands clench into a large, dark stain on his overtunic - the beginning of a black river that paints itself down his linen tunic and trousers and shoes too.

“What is it?” Her words are all teeth and rigid jaw.

The screams come and go on the shifting breeze. It is a high and terrible cry: a primal, hoarse screech. The sound of it brings bile to the back of Athelstan’s throat that burns when he swallows it back down. The sand pales into grey.

Bjorn shakes his head, breathless. He catches Authny’s sleeve in a red-smeared hand.

“Blood,” Athelstan breathes out. It is all blood.

Rannveyg hushes him with a sharp hiss.

Authny gives Bjorn a quick shake, rattling his belt buckle. “Speak, lad!”

“Uxi,” he pants out at last, “go quickly.”

She exhales a short, near-silent breath of shock and lets go of him with a little push that sends him back a few steps in the sand. Then, without another word, she gathers up her skirts and races round the shore towards the boat pilings. Rannveyg follows, her face drawn pale and the sodden hem of her dress whipping about her legs like a sail in a storm.

Bjorn stays fixed in place, staring at the ground, his chest heaving. His breath whistles uncontrolled from between gritted teeth and he digs his fingers into his hips, his hands a bloodless white between the sweeping smears of crimson on his skin.

When Athelstan dares to move, taking several tentative steps across the sand, his footsteps crunch like brittle bones. “What can I do? To help?”

Bjorn looks up with wild, unfocused eyes. They catch on Athelstan’s face and narrow into ugly hatred. “Nobody needs _your_ help.” He turns his back and kicks at the sand, then at a piece of driftwood - a worm-eaten, weathered grey tree branch. The noise is like a hammer on a stone, sudden in the shocked quiet and Athelstan flinches, head spinning in the prickling grey. Bjorn’s hands are fists, his breath comes in hitched grunts something very close to crying and he kicks harder. He kicks until the branch splinters, spraying shards of dead wood across the shore. Somewhere to Athelstan’s left, the ewe bawls again. “Go clean the faering,” Bjorn spits over his shoulder, “it’s a mess.”

Uxi is still screaming. Bjorn’s leather overtunic is sodden with blood. Athelstan thinks of Authny or Vakr having to scrub their youngest son’s blood from their own faering the next time they go fishing. He thinks from the way Bjorn’s face has drained to ashen white that it might be the last blood Uxi ever bleeds. He nods, but Bjorn is already walking away.

***

Round by the pier, all the faerings have been pulled up to shore and lashed to the pilings, the sails and oars are neatly stowed and from a distance they look as they always do. But Bjorn spoke true - inside, Vakr’s is a mess. Blood drips down the strakes to pool at the bottom where it runs in a deep, scarlet river towards the stern. The oars are slippery with it, the fore-thwart smeared in great swathes of red. The faering is painted in it, in smudged hand- and boot-prints, in drip and spray and splatter. Athelstan stares, his gut sickening. It is a wonder Uxi has any blood left in him.

It takes all afternoon to clean it off. Each time Athelstan empties his bucket into the river the bloody water blooms outwards in creeping tendrils before fading into a cloud of light red and ebbing away downstream. In the bottom of the faering -on hands and knees, scrubbing beneath the thwarts -the blood moulds around him in fat, sticky lumps. Flies swarm on it. They crawl onto Athelstan’s hands too, up his trouser legs, down the neck of his tunic. They climb over his neck and into his ear where the drippings of his own blood have long since dried. They search the gouges on his arms and when he flicks out to get rid of them, they whirl up about his face and settle down again on his cheeks and eyelids. A plague of them. Athelstan flattens his lips tight shut against them and puffs his breath out of his nose at their attempts to crawl up inside his nostrils. When he stops to breathe, leaning out over the side of the faering away from the swarm, he can taste the iron of blood on the back of his tongue so full and thick it is as if he has been drinking it cup by cup.

The sun is well past its zenith now. It burns the sleepy yellow of a day heading towards completion, sinking towards the summits of the western hills. It is about the hour of Nones and Athelstan jolts at the sudden realisation, knocking his chin on the oar. Nones is the hour of mourning. Uxi is still silent, the women have ceased their hurried errands to and from Authny’s longhouse and Vakr stands beneath the alder, drooped against the gnarled trunk, staring into the depths of the river. His wounded leg, crooked from the knee down, is splayed out sideways in a position that looks painful even for a healthy limb, but Vakr is still as death. Everything is still but the water, rushing on in its ceaseless race to the sea.

"'I will not die, but live,'" Athelstan whispers, finding comfort in the English, "'and tell God's works afar. The Lord has cleansed me: he has not betrayed me to death.'" In his mind, he can hear the call and response of the Kyrie that follows the psalm. _Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy._ “Lord, have mercy!”

The breeze sighs and Athelstan sighs after it, drawing back into the faering. His elbow knocks the rowlock and it rattles, a shard of colour shivering out from beneath it and into the hot sunlight. Curious, Athelstan pries his fingers into the small gap between the side of the faering and the protruding iron and tugs the colour out. It is a piece of cloth, mostly black from drying blood but the ripped edge of it still carries a short section of woven braid, twisted out of yellow and blue threads. It falls into Athelstan’s palm, wet and heavy, and splits apart into its pieces - braid and wool and linen and a small chunk of slippery flesh.

The sky whirls and Athelstan closes his eyes to still it.

The air is close here in the chapel - thick with choking dust - and Athelstan struggles to breathe curled up small in the thin gap behind the altar. He teeters on the toes of his aching right foot and his left leg twists beneath him, scratching on the floor. There are footsteps now, clacking in across the stone threshold, thudding atop the boards, and voices speaking faintly familiar words.

Athelstan squeezes his eyes shut, taking long, shallow, quiet breaths past cracked-dry lips. He counts them in and out in all the languages he knows. One, two, three. Unus, duo, tres.

More babbling. Screams outside. Athelstan screws his eyes tighter and leans his head against the back of the altar, shivering. His ankle trembles, his toes draw up into a tight, burning cramp.

Heis, duo, treis. His breath is thunderous. Un, doi, trois.

They will _hear_ him. A soft laugh. Einn, tveir, thrir.

Athelstan’s eyes fly open. Northmen.

And he slips, his shoulder pushing into the back of the wooden altar with a heart-stopping creak. There follows a sudden, weighty silence. The silence of a hawk before it dives after its prey. Then there is a hand at his chest, strong and heavy, dragging him out of his hiding place and—

—and there are bodies everywhere. They are strewn across the dirt courtyard between the chapel and the outer walls. Athelstan stops in the doorway, sobbing, the rescued book clutched to his chest. He pulls it in tighter, so that the corners of the board cover press into the space between his ribs, stabbing at his shuddering lungs, and he stares at the ruination around him. Less than an hour before these men were singing Vespers with him. Now they are dead, discarded where they fell like dung.

His chest aches.

Brother Godric is on his back near the necessarium, visible now behind the pointlessly smashed ruins of the privacy screen. All his limbs are curled and bent above him like those of a dead spider, his head a mass of blood and stark white bone, the lime-washed wall behind him smeared with gore.

Brother Hwitred sprawls face down in the middle of the yard, the skirts of his habit blown up over his back by the wind. His legs are splayed wide - perhaps he was running when he was cut down - displaying all his nakedness. A passing Northman kicks out at the cold-shrunken genitals and laughs when the body jerks across the ground, as if in the throes of intimacy.

Someone has beheaded Brother Eldwyn. He lies in front of the stable, one wrinkled hand outthrown. His head does not. It has rolled six feet away, the eyes huge and bulging, staring in gaping surprise up at the bright heavens from a glistening pool of his own lifeblood. It must have just happened because the jagged wound at the neck of the body is still spurting it out, thick and black-red. A long flap of skin drapes down over the round of gristly flesh, hiding the tubes of Eldwyn’s throat and the bones of his spine. It flutters at each new gush of blood. Some of Eldwyn’s beard is still attached to it, the neatly-trimmed grey hairs now drooping over the ruined remains of his neck.

Athelstan sobs harder, sliming his face with snot and the sticky salt of tears. A hazy numbness creeps over him. And Ragnar, without a single hesitation in his step at the bloody chaos around them, drags Athelstan from the chapel door right through the spreading puddle of blood. Athelstan stumbles and steps in it.

A sound emerges from his throat - a strangled, keening cry. It bounces back dull and small and impotent. He shrinks from it, but it slips, choking, down his throat and turns to stone there. Yanking himself from Ragnar’s grip, Athelstan falls into the bottom of the faering, his hand sliding into the hot thickness of Uxi’s blood, with Uxi’s flesh still cradled in his cupped palm. Haziness drifts over him again, like slipping into a dream, and he lies there a while, gasping and shaking. The sun burns hot over the western mountains.

Back at Lindisfarne, when those who were left alive were taken out beyond the walls - a sad procession of dazed men - Athelstan left footprints of Eldwyn’s blood through the sand until his sandal became caked in yellow-brown grime. Days later, Ragnar complained of the smell and yanked it from his foot to wash it in the sea, returning it afterwards with a flourish and a smirking grin, as if he offered something wonderful. And Athelstan had to wear it for ten more days, treading death at every step.

Athelstan pushes himself up again, sniffing to clear his tear-stuffed nose, and finishes scrubbing death from the boards of the faering. His hands tremble almost beyond use, the palsied fingers of an old, old man.

When the boat is clean, Athelstan washes out the bucket and the scrubbing brush, rinses the cloths and spreads them to dry in the sun. Then he staggers behind the house into the woods, stumbling through sharp green grass, deep into the shadows of the oak trees. His vision twists and turns and his throat burns with fire. He reaches out through the blinding gloom, finds the lumpy knot of a tree trunk with his grasping hand, drops to his knees and throws up until there is nothing left.


	4. Chapter 4

Athelstan cups his hands in the black water and splashes it over his face. It folds frozen fingers around his neck and plasters cold hands on his quaking shoulders. The touch of it burns, like Ragnar’s knife against his skin. Athelstan shrugs that off with a jerking flinch of one shoulder and drops his chin to his shuddering chest. Water drips clear from the tendrils of his brown hair down onto his filthy trousers - splattered with the putrid evidence of his disgrace - and his shivering increases, his bones chill with the leeching cold that always follows a violent purging. He swallows at the lingering taste of gall in the back of his throat, sour as too-young wine.

Here in the wood’s quiet chapel, beneath the gaze of its green-hooded choir of oak, the pool murmurs familiar chants against footings of rock. But if Athelstan closes his eyes, the song rises into a thunder, thrumming in his ribs and echoing around the hollow of his chest. His cross slips from his tunic and dangles there, twisting on its cord. Almost, he feels Ragnar’s hand on his arm, pressing him down. Almost, he hears Cenwulf’s habit scratching against his. But it is only the water-worn granite rasping against his trousers.

He drops his hands to his knees, lax in helplessness, and scrapes his thumbnail across the dried blood that stiffens the wool to black pitch. He itches to strip off his clothing, to peel the death from his skin, to throw it in the water as he did with his sandals after Ragnar left, watching them bob away with a twist of terrified defiance in his stomach. He grasps at the hem of his tunic with trembling hands, preparing to do just that, except that he has nothing else but his habit and Ragnar would likely be amused to make him go naked until the garments could be replaced.

Athelstan sighs and unroots a clump of springy moss from the rock instead, tossing it into the water with a flick of his wrist. It bobs in the middle for a while, long enough that the hushed rumble on the edge of his hearing begins to seem imagined. Then, quite without warning, it is snatched away to the base of the looming grey cliff, battered against the pitted rock once, twice, and disappears beneath it in a flurry of foam.

“That’s our river,” Ragnar told him once, on their second journey from Kattegat, and Athelstan had to bite down on the retort that jumped into his thoughts - that nothing in this place would ever be ‘ours’ for him. “Or half of it at least, it forks a little way above the settlement,” Ragnar continued, pointing past the flickering edge of their twilit fire and into the deep shadow of the valley, where a crashing white waterfall emerged from the yawning mouth of a cave. Even hundreds of feet above, Athelstan thought he could taste the cold mist on the tip of his tongue.

Ragnar began rooting around in his leather knapsack and Athelstan went back to snapping branches for the fire. His journeys with Ragnar were characterised by silence - whether Ragnar preferred it to idle words or just to Athelstan in particular - and he was of no mind to break it himself with the creaking memory of the gibbet still fresh.

“I heard tell of a man who fell in there once, back at the farm.” Ragnar pushed a whole brined egg into his mouth, staring at Athelstan with his usual uncomfortable intensity. His chewing was sloppy and loud, wriggling the patchy stubble on his cheeks, and Athelstan’s stomach rolled at the noise. Ragnar smirked, his eyes flickering over Athelstan’s down-turned mouth, and he chewed the remains of his mouthful with even more exaggeration before offering his knapsack across the fire. And at Athelstan’s hesitation, Ragnar shook it, tempting a rumble from Athelstan’s stomach. “He didn’t wash out,” Ragnar jerks his chin towards the waterfall, “for three full days. And his fingers were stripped of flesh down to the bone from trying to save himself. Don’t take too many,” he added with a casual air, just as Athelstan ventured to reach into the knapsack.

Athelstan swallowed down the taste of cold mist, frozen in the motion of pulling an egg out. Ragnar’s expression was inscrutable as usual and Athelstan could not tell how much was truth and how much was a threat, or simply a joke at his expense. In the end, Ragnar withdrew the knapsack, leaving Athelstan with his full hand out-stretched and stupid over the fire. That night, he woke repeatedly from dreams of drowning.

Now, Athelstan holds his hands up and spreads his fingers wide to the light. Uxi’s blood paints the cracks of his palms and the beds of his nails, packed so deep that they are tipped in black, like the curved talons of a gyrfalcon. A tingling panic tickles up his spine. He should get the blood out. He scratches at a knuckle, digging out small flecks from the crevice of his skin, hunched and intent on his task, until his own blood beads up and trickles down his finger, covering Uxi’s blood in his own. Athelstan stops and presses his thumb to the small wound. There is no use in it. It will never come out. He should get back to work.

Even so, he kneels there for a time longer, one hand grasped in the other, waiting in vain for the crushing weight to loose his heart. But eventually, he must give up on that too and climb to his feet again, his legs trembling and uncertain as a newborn calf's. He makes his way back up the little staircase of tree roots, back past the bowed heads of the oaks, standing in their disordered half-circle before the sombre face of the cliff. And sweeping his hand along one rugged trunk, he passes between the final guardians and into the tunnel of holly that hugs the wall of rock.

It is too shady for grass in here, below the enclosing roof of dark, glossy leaves that block out all but a small dappling of light from the lowering sun. Instead, the ground is springy with years of mulched leaves piled high and soft atop the compacted soil and Athelstan's footsteps rustle in quiet consonance. A little way ahead, the tunnel opens onto emerald grass and the slope of the hill, climbing up on the right. Athelstan's step falters there and he draws to a stop.

Smashed into the grass at the threshold of this quiet cloister is his shameful impression, bloody at the hands and knees, topped with a pile of stinking vomit. He hasn’t been so sick since he was very young and still prone to catching ill with every winter disease. But then he had Eldwyn. Eldwyn, who tended his garden as if each plant were a child, who would wake graciously at any hour to care for those in his charge, whose most human failing was a tendency to sing almost imperceptibly off-pitch when the cantor was in his bad graces. Athelstan never had a great many friends, but Eldwyn was one. Sometimes it seems there cannot be room enough in his heart for all the grief that swells there, and he feels as though he is shattering from the inside out. And all the while these Northmen are tearing him apart from the outside in, like ravens.

Athelstan takes a quieting breath of the cool, moist air, that drifts through from the pool and reaches out for something, anything, to steady his trembling knees. His hand lands on a holly branch beside a clutch of red berries that has sprung far too early. And below them, buried deep beneath the lowest boughs, a shadow within a shadow, is the ewe.

His heart starts thumping again, fast and hard. She is on her side, asleep. Cautious and quiet, he lies down and, digging his elbows into the half-mud, worms his way beneath the snagging holly leaves, his face into the moist layer of decaying leaves. He spits gritty leaf mould from his lips, sucking in the odour of wet rot and damp fleece, and puts a hand on the ewe’s warm back, feeling around towards her neck for the belt. His shaking fingers draw short at her shoulders and he shuffles closer again - a complicated sideways wriggle with knees and wrists, scrabbling his grip up between her shoulder-blades.

At the last moment, as the tips of his fingers brush against the leather of the belt, he kicks his leg out too far and knocks her. She rolls back towards him as if to get to her feet and Athelstan grabs out at her, fisting a big handful of the loose skin on her side. It folds into his palm and she stops moving again. Athelstan heaves himself up and atop her in the space between the twisting branches and the holly’s sturdy, grey trunk. She makes no noise at this attack, her legs remain limp and still. There is no fall and rise of panicked breath against his hand either. She isn’t breathing. Or perhaps it’s too shallow to feel.

Athelstan twists his head about, trying in vain to blink away the dimness of this small chamber. The ewe’s head is caught in the branches and - Athelstan feels about, testing with his fingers what he suspects - trapped there by the loose end of the belt. He tugs at the flat edges of it, scratching his fingertips against the branches. It is knotted about the holly, snagged tight as a noose. He cannot free it that way, so he digs his fingers into the fleece at her neck, not caring to be gentle, and manages finally to scratch the buckle open. Her head flops to the ground on a neck distended and clearly broken.

“No,” he moans. A wave of crushing despair sweeps over him, squeezing his breath out of his lungs. He has killed Ragnar’s ewe. And not just the ewe, but all the lambs she would have borne to breed, to eat, to sell. How much is all that worth? More or less than a new slave?

Despair swells into panic, flooding up hot and fast through his chest and into his throat. He needs to get rid of her. Athelstan grabs at the carcass and starts dragging it out from beneath the holly, yanking at the boneless neck and tangling himself in the sharp, grasping leaves in his panicked haste. If he can get her into the pool, then she will be spewed out far away. He can pretend she was only lost. She makes a dark furrow in the ground, ploughing through the deep layer of leaves, and strands of her fleece catch on the green holly, leaving new sprays of black bursting out along the path Athelstan is forging. He will have to cover it up. Thank God no one can see him.

He freezes, half upright at the edge of the trees, the ewe’s face caught by a shaft of orange light slicing through the tight tunnel of trees.

“I am planning a _lie_!” A pointless lie even, for lost is as good as dead. Ragnar can no more breed from a lost ewe than he can from one with a broken neck.

Athelstan’s hand slips from the ewe’s neck and he trips backwards away from her until he hits the rock face, knocking his dizzy head even dizzier. His knees fold beneath him and he slips to the ground. The stone is cold against his hot back and Athelstan starts shivering again with a sudden, violent trembling. What is going to happen to him when Ragnar comes back, with Bjorn so angry at him and the ewe dead? Ragnar will surely kill him for it. His ship will be full of new slaves and chests full of treasures and this time, if the Earl wants to keep their loyalty, he must let the raiders keep their plunder. Ragnar will not need the ewe’s price out of Athelstan’s skin, he will only need rid of a costly liability. Will Ragnar bury him afterwards, or simply throw him on the dung-heap to rot?

A strange, hot buzzing fills his body, travelling up into his head and out into his numb fingers. It makes a tumult in his ears, like a swarm of angry, harvest wasps. And below that noise is the wheezing struggle of his lungs trying to pull in air. But he cannot breathe. He leans forward, forehead on his knees, gasping at breaths that will not come.

He is a secret here, no less than the pool's private path beneath the hills. If he dies here, no one in England will ever know it. His history will be only what is written in the priory's annals, a sentence or two at most, scribbled in the margin of the Easter tables. ' _In the Year of our Lord 793, the Northmen came.’_ He writes it in his mind’s eye, seeing the letters form in a tiny hand at the edge of the vellum. ‘ _They wrought slaughter and took away with them captives and the treasures of this house.’_ And in the silent space between that short note and the next will lie the whole of Athelstan’s life, and those of all the others who have already died on these shores, unremarked. No one will ever know or record the rest.

There is no one left but him now to remember the long crossing of the sea and how the horror faded into terrible anticipation. Those windless, drifting days stretched as endlessly as the horizon, filled with the smell of blood and unwashed bodies and the stink of those who soiled themselves from fear. He alone knows the stiffness of Cenwulf’s shoulder against his when he awoke that final afternoon and the bright splash the body made when it was thrown into the fjord. All of that, and all these long days toiling under a harsh sun, lonely and heartsick and forlorn, all nothing but a wordless breath between lines of ink.

His throat is thick. He wishes now that he had never begged Ragnar for his life. He wishes he could have seen this day coming and known to go against desperate instinct and stay quiet. It would have been better to die in his home, among his own people, where someone would mourn his passing. Better the quick thrust of a knife through the throat in an act of war. He doesn’t want to die here, alone and worthless and unmourned.

But he could run. The idea slips into his mind in an insistent whisper, almost audible. In his head, the buzzing fades a little and Athelstan draws one deep breath, his lungs expanding at last against the stricture of his ribs, and tilts his head as if to listen. He _should_ run. He takes another long breath. The rhythm of the day is already disrupted. And it is so easy to work late on these bright summer evenings. He will not be missed for hours yet. Good, dependable Athelstan. Stupid, cowardly Athelstan. He should go now, before the chance is lost.

He doesn’t remember getting up, but he is already walking. He trots through the tunnel, past the pig wallow, through the sprawling web of birch branches in the direction of the orchard, until the cliff recedes into the wooded hill. Athelstan pauses at the foot of it, glancing about, but the woods are quiet as a graveyard and without a further thought he turns, not across the grass to the orchard path but onto the beaten trail slanting up the hill, climbing quick and sure. He swipes sweaty palms on his tunic - his heart pounding so hard that the linen shudders like a drum skin - then clenches his trembling fingers down at his sides, pressing the knuckles of his fists against his thighs. His mind is dull, as if his head has been stuffed with wool and ale.

The path slips upwards through bushy undergrowth and turns rocky as it meets pine. It twists past a rill that Athelstan hops over, sending stones skittering into the shallow, bubbling water with a clatter and splash. Below, the scattered brown pine trunks frame windows of sight down on the emerald canopy of birches and oaks and beyond them, the broken blue ribbon of the river.

Then, between one step and the next, the treeline breaks out onto the open grass meadow that crowns the hill. It is a dry yellow-green and the cooling breeze carries its sweet scent past Athelstan, southeast along the range and down towards Kattegat. But the path goes the other way too, following the ridge of the hill as it snakes, first southwest then northwards again. In the distance, it becomes just one of many other ranges, one wavering line above another, fading to a watery blue at the edge of sight. In places, these lines are broken by taller peaks of snow-dotted black rock and from one of these precipices an eagle gives out its piercing, desolate cry. Athelstan shivers at the sound, the instinctual fear of one who knows he is prey.

When he steps forward onto the path’s fork, he settles quite by accident onto the long, flat stone where Ragnar habitually stops and into the grooves that his feet have worn there. Here he is in Ragnar’s place, wearing Ragnar’s shoes, stuffed with moss in the toes to make up the difference in size, and Athelstan looks back down at the settlement just as Ragnar always does. Though not because he wishes to take one last, wistful glance, nor from any need to be welcomed home by the sight of a place that has never been anything but a cage to him. But perhaps simply because he wants to watch himself be rid of it.

The roofs of the longhouses peek out through the gaps in the trees. In the air above them, the smudge of smoke from the hearth fires casts a deeper haze than can be explained by distance. In this place, he has been tricked and threatened and mocked and treated like a beast. If he stays, he will be killed like one too.

He steps out onto the westward path, his body thrumming with hopeful nerves and a twist of wrongness in his stomach that feels almost like guilt. “There’s nothing to be guilty about,” he tells himself, though his thoughts sound wavering and doubtful spoken aloud. “It is no sin to escape slavery.” And all he must do to disappear is to get out of sight around the sweep of the hill. He takes another step along the path, hesitates and glances back down the hill a final time. In the yard of Ragnar’s longhouse is the hitching post to which Ragnar tied him when they first arrived, like a witless animal. And Ragnar left him there to be examined like one too, to be poked and prodded and made fun of while he and Lagertha took their time about greeting each other. Athelstan swallows down a lump of bitter anger as hard as a rock. But also in the yard, someone is drawing up water from the well, and Athelstan doesn't need to see more than the faint shape of the movement to know that it is Gyda.

He draws up short as if jerked back physically by a tether. He promised Ragnar that he would take care of the children. The guilt twists and flips and grows. Before him, the path stretches out towards freedom. All he has to do is begin walking. But he made an oath, and if he runs he will be forsworn. Athelstan’s stomach lurches as if falling and the tentative, fluttering hope turns into a stone in the pit of it, pressing him down to the earth. If he runs, he might gain freedom, but he will destroy himself in the making of it. Athelstan the liar and the oathbreaker. Athelstan the betrayer of children. And God will strike down what is left of him in fair judgement. He steps back and slumps to the ground. He cannot leave. Yet he has not the courage to face his death. He lays his blood-crusted hands open in his lap. His lungs squeeze tight, turning every drawn breath into a battle, and his head begins to buzz again.

He grabs the tendril of another thought and tugs on it, pulling it through the swirling knots of panic. Ragnar is a calculating man, one for deliberated punishment, not killing rages. And Ragnar still needs him. He could have killed Athelstan for his pathetic rebellion by the gibbet. Instead, he cut the rope and made Athelstan choose between death by the law or willing obedience, knowing that there was really no choice but to get up and follow. Athelstan cannot as yet untangle all the twisted maze of Ragnar’s thoughts, but whatever purpose he has in mind for Athelstan, it requires him alive for now.

“’Slaves be subject to your masters with all reverence, not only to the kind and gentle,’” he stops to gain control of his chattering teeth, “’but also to the cruel.’” Perhaps it is not cowardly to be afraid, but it is cowardly to run from punishment earned and to abandon his sworn duty in selfish flight. Athelstan rubs his face with the heel of his hand, blood flaking off onto his cheek. It is unlike him to act like this, so stupid and irrational, startling and taking to heel like a flighty mare at the flutter of sparrows. He plants his feet against the twisting roots of a long-fallen tree and sits forward, reaching to push his knife aside before the handle jabs up between his ribs, and finds nothing but empty air. His tunic lies loose as his habit, untethered. Athelstan pats at his waist, frowning, somehow expecting to find an invisible belt beneath his hand, and invisible tools hanging from it. But of course there is nothing and he dips his head and laughs. The sound is a little too high to be anything other than hysterical and the heave in his chest is too close to sobbing for comfort, sitting on the edge of something dark and consuming. Jonah ran from God rather than go to the heathens and ended up in the belly of a giant fish. It seems Athelstan’s wild flight was not doomed to be any more successful - a runaway slave in a mountainous wilderness full of predators without even an eating knife to defend himself. The consequences of such folly would be short and bloody.

Down in the settlement, Gyda is doing Athelstan’s job - watering the animals for the evening - and Athelstan pushes himself to his feet. He has work to do, at least for today. And now that he has made a choice he finds that his legs are steadier, his lungs are clearer. Ragnar may return tomorrow, and Athelstan will likely get a beating. And he may bend under it, but he will not break.


	5. Chapter 5

“Greetings!”

The voice comes from close over his left shoulder and Athelstan jerks and spins - tripping over his own feet in his startled haste - and slips backwards down the hill. He cries out, tensing in anticipation of a horrific tumble, and grabs out at the air, managing - at the last moment - to catch a handful of a shrub before his feet leave the earth entirely.

The stranger laughs and hauls Athelstan upright by a handful of his tunic with such a wrench that they end up chest to chest on the path. The man smells of lye and sweat, and when he lets go he leaves a damp handprint above Athelstan's heart. Between the man's bushy beard and thick blonde hair, the small stripe of his face is tanned and weather-worn, sundried in creases at the corners of his eyes.

“I’ll have to warn your master against allowing you up so high,” he says, grinning wide white teeth, “or he’ll have one less slave to feed.” His voice is a deep, rumbling one that reminds Athelstan of Rollo and a nervous itch starts up between his shoulder-blades that he quells with fisted hands.

The stranger flicks pale grey eyes down at Athelstan's whitening fingers and grins wider. "I hope for his sake he has others if you are so determined to fall off of things. It looks as though you have taken quite a few tumbles today already. But seeing as I have just saved you from breaking your neck, you can do the service of taking me to him, or to his steward. I think there is a steading nearby. Unless I have interrupted your escape?"

Athelstan blinks and shakes his head at the last, letting out a breath of relief that he can speak the truth. "I was just starting back. And I am the steward, although my master is away…" …killing and stealing and laying waste. How many more are dead by now? Athelstan swallows against the sudden dryness in his throat.

"Ah, a pity for me, then. I am seeking a place at a hearth." The stranger rolls each shoulder, settling the straps of his leather pack and bow bag further towards his thickly muscled neck. He leans forward, staring at Athelstan's face, then down at the mess of his clothes. In the flaring golden light of the waning sun, the bloodstains on Athelstan's trousers are glimmering black patches. "And a pity for you, for you seem to have run into more trouble than a few simple falls with him gone."

“It is… it has been a troublesome day.”

The man snorts a laugh. “There will be plenty more troublesome days in this land, as even the suckling child knows. You must be new indeed not to have learned this yet, nor yet been taught not to turn ash-pale at the sight of a little blood.” He taps Athelstan’s cheek, two sharp stings with his meaty hand. Athelstan’s own blood rushes up hot to the skin and he flinches sideways, frowning. “I would suggest you get used to it,” the man continues, “as soon as you can. You will fare poorly as a leysingr otherwise.”

Athelstan shakes his head. “I have seen enough.” There have been floods of it, bucketfuls. He knows how much there is in a man’s body, what it looks like spread over the ground. “I have no wish for more.”

In return, Athelstan gets another snorted laugh, this time followed by a mocking grunt. “Then I suggest you throw yourself from the hill properly. That is the only way your wish will be granted here. But save that until another day, I still need a place to sleep and a wish of my own granted. This way?” the man asks, pointing, and – without waiting for an answer - takes the downhill path with a swift stride.

Athelstan hesitates and the distance between them stretches. Bjorn has ordered him to jump into the river and drown enough times that Athelstan is well-versed in ignoring such instructions. But there is instead a twisted knot of questions growing in his mind. He itches to blurt them all out at once and bites his tongue hard against the desire. Brother Sigeric, the novice-master, was always sorely vexed in the face of Athelstan’s ceaseless inquiry and was forever administering him penances for it, but it is a considerably more dangerous flaw to have now. He casts one final look at the westward path, slipped so far from reach now that even the possibility seems only a dream, and turns to follow the stranger back down towards the settlement.

The man takes long, sure-footed strides, rolling each foot a little from the outside in, but not on every step, as if it is a habit which comes now and then without thought. Consequently, his footfall is sometimes loud and sometimes silent on the scattered stones of the path. _CRUNCH pad pad pad, CRUNCH pad pad_. And over that, as Athelstan hurries to catch up, is the slithering _slip-thump_ of his own clumsy steps.

“What is your name?” Athelstan calls out after him. “What do you need here?” He tries for a tone of polite interest, but he is out of breath from his downhill scramble and the words come out more abrupt than he intends, punctuated with the rasp of sliding stones as he skids briefly.

"I usually take the more direct route north from Kattegat, up over the hills," the stranger says, waving a vague hand in the air to accompany his still vaguer response, "up to the lake and around. A few month's walking. The longer in the wilds the better for me. I'm not one for a soft bed, except now and then if it comes with a soft body." His chuckle carries out through the trees and some small creature nearby startles, setting off a sharp rustle of leaves. "I am on urgent business today, though, and looking for a little help. Although some company and a good meal will not go amiss either. 'A chance to listen and be listened to', as the Wise One says." He prattles on in the distinctly purposeless manner of one who is accustomed to long silences, less _to_ Athelstan than _at_ him, as if any pair of ears will do for the listening and any words will do for the speaking. But he quiets when they reach the bottom of the hill, stopping to gaze about at the little stable, the covered log store, and the sprawled, fat pigs. Finally, he peers through the trees towards the two largest longhouses, just visible at the edge of the woods. The breeze has died down again for the moment and the smoke of the hearth fires sift out in hazy upward streams.

The houses seem somehow smaller and poorer from here than they do from above. Ragnar’s is the most well-kept, re-roofed in recent years with neat wooden boards weathering to silver. The long gable-boards - tipped with wolf-heads carved in the rough Norse fashion - cross above the point of the roof to stretch and snap at the sky. Otherwise, the building is a simple one. Vakr’s longhouse is yet more ramshackle - a rough construction of boards and grass thatch that have both aged badly, with the boards shrinking in the summer heat so that the building is more gap than wall. Overall, it is a pathetic little settlement, a sinking disappointment even after Kattegat’s insignificant sprawl. The stranger makes no indication of his feelings, of whether he finds the sight as dismaying as Athelstan did when he first arrived, but after a short survey he abandons the path and jumps down the last few feet of the hill, landing sure as a mountain goat in the grass.

Athelstan scrambles after him down the dusty slope. “How did you know?” he blurts out into the silence, forgetting already that he should not be indulging his curiosities. “How did you know that I am a slave?”

The man turns his sharp gaze on Athelstan again and huffs in the back of his throat. “You do not know even these simple things? And yet you are already trusted with the keys to the house?” This is accompanied by a raised eyebrow at Athelstan’s beltless tunic. “Your master is either a very wise or a very foolish man.”

"But how did you know?" Athelstan returns the hard stare. Now that he has dared to ask, he wants an answer. And if he has another opportunity, one day, to run without breaking his oath…

The stranger’s eyes glint, a twinkle of interest or amusement or insight, Athelstan cannot tell. And he begins to expect Ragnar’s enigmatic smirk as an answer, perhaps accompanied by a heavy cuff across the back of his head that disorients more than it hurts. But the man just huffs again and seizes a fistful of Athelstan’s hair above his left ear. “No collar, that is true. He has not had the time or silver yet, I’d wager, to take you to the blacksmith. But this,” he tugs at Athelstan’s tunic, so obviously not made for him, “and no sax either. No free man would consider himself dressed without a weapon on his belt.” Here he smacks the palm of his free hand into Athelstan’s stomach. It’s a winding blow and Athelstan jerks forward, needing to double up but unable to because the man is pulling back on his hair, forcing his throat to bare. “And the hair…” The man’s grip is tight and painful and when he gives a sharp shake Athelstan staggers sideways with a grunt, head twisted down and back where he is pulled. He reaches to pry the man’s fingers off but remembers himself and stops before he touches, his hand hovering there, useless. The man lets go at last, then delivers a casual slap at the crown of Athelstan’s head that is still heavy enough to make him stumble forward. “The hair gives it away entirely. I saw some dead captives in Kattegat with similar some weeks back, so I see that you were taken on the same raid. There is not enough left of them to tell now, of course. The crows had most of them before they burst, and the insects had the rest afterwards. Now I suppose there is someone here I can direct my request to with your master gone?” And he turns his back on Athelstan’s wheezing, looking from one longhouse to the other.

The words slip past so quickly that it takes a moment for them to sink in, for Athelstan to feel the blow of them. When they do, he ducks his head in a jerking bow, not so much in agreement but more to hide what he knows is an open expression of horror blooming on his face. He has spent his time here trying not to think about any of it, including the remains of poor Bregwald and Leppa, left swinging on the gibbet for everyone to stare at. His memories are full of terrors enough without imagining what they might look like now. It takes him much too long to compose himself.

"His son," he manages, at last, his voice buzzing loud as a beehive in his own ears, "his son is head of the household until his return." He wipes his sweaty palms on his dusty tunic for something to do with his trembling fingers and edges past the stranger with his head down. The man falls in on his heels this time and Athelstan stiffens, the itch between his shoulders growing. He veers further than necessary to the right, aiming to intersect the path to the south of the tanning racks, keeping a deliberate distance from the gnarled oak near the holly tunnel. But when the breeze wafts up it seems as if he can still smell it, the spoiled-milk stench of his humiliation.

When Athelstan rounds the corner onto the path, he can see Bjorn sitting in the doorway of the longhouse, holding his knife and a green willow stick. He is not so much whittling as hacking at it, lips pursed in concentrated anger, and what was yesterday evening the beginning of some knowable shape is now only a jagged strip of wood. Curled splinters of it dust the threshold.

At the sound of Athelstan’s footsteps in the yard, Bjorn jerks his head up and stands, squaring his shoulders. His face is still pale but his cheeks flush in pinpoints of angry red. “Where have you been? I’m hungry and Gyda is too busy to start the meal. And who is this?” His tone is little-boy petulant and he points his destroyed stick at the stranger at Athelstan’s back.

Athelstan opens his mouth to give a name, then remembers he never received one himself and shuts it again with a clack.

Bjorn rolls his eyes and draws breath to deliver, no doubt, a suitably curt rebuke for Athelstan's latest failure when the stranger interrupts him.

“’Hail to a good host!’” he says, striding forward into the sunlight, his pack knocking Athelstan sideways into the fence. “’A guest is on the threshold, ready to try his luck.’ My name is Sjurd.”

Bjorn’s bubbling anger slips away, replaced by wide-eyed eagerness. “You are a skald?”

“Ha!” Sjurd barks a laugh. “No, I just keep old One-eye’s wise sayings in my head.” And here he taps his forehead with a dirt-encrusted finger. “A man tires of his own wisdom soon enough when that is all he has. Though I am a hunter by trade, and I have gained a fair few tales that way if you’re interested to hear them?”

“Interested?” Bjorn grins. “All the company I’ve had lately is my sister and _him._ ” He spits the last word at Athelstan, slipping the glare of revulsion on and off of his face quick as a flash of light. “And she only wants to hear his boring Christian stories about women falling in love in fields.” Bjorn claps Sjurd on the arm with a hand that is tiny in comparison, though Sjurd makes no indication of noticing the disparity at all. “Come inside. You,” he jabs his knife in Athelstan’s direction without bothering to look back at him, “go get the good ale out.”

***

Athelstan is in the yard butchering a hen when Gyda returns from helping Authny. She stamps along the little path past the garden, creating such a disturbance that the twisting tendrils of the staked beans flutter in the wake of her passing. Her face is set in stone about her red-rimmed eyes and she squeezes the bundle of her apron dress against her stomach, crushing the folds of wool in her fingers. Below it, the skirts of her shift ripple with her trotting steps, making a waterfall of the red and brown stains splattered down her front.

Athelstan’s chest shivers, his legs tremble and he leans against the bench to hold himself up, clutching the handle of his utility knife and bracing his palm against the floating mess of chicken guts. The edge of the bench presses his rope belt into his hips. It feels loose and strange already compared to his new clothes, and Ragnar’s keys hang strangely on it.

“Gyda?” There are a thousand questions wrapped up in the word, none of which Athelstan can form into something intelligible.

But Gyda bites her lip hard with her sharp front teeth and doesn’t look at him anyway, crossing the yard to the big washtub in the centre and casting her bundle into the water. It lands with a furious splash and water washes over the sides, trickling down the wood and pattering onto the dust in droplets of silvered rose. Gyda makes a choked noise and plunges her hands into the tub, scrubbing at the stains with a ferocity that makes Athelstan worry for the wool. Her breath shudders in and out with sharp little gasps and her back quivers with the tension of a bow pulled too taut, ready to snap and fly apart.

Athelstan swallows down guilt and it sinks -writhing - into his gut. He goes back to dividing the hen’s carcass, shuffling his aching feet and knocking Frodi, who lies in the cool shadow beneath it, which earns him a rumbled reproach. The hen’s warm flesh twitches against Athelstan’s fingers and a new wave of bile rises up in his throat, thin and sour.

Eventually, Gyda’s frantic movement slows and stops and she lifts her dripping hands from the water and rests them on the lip of the washtub, the wood digging into her palms, staring into the tub with glazed, unfocused eyes. Athelstan recognises in the way she folds in on herself a resigned finality like his own back at the pool.

The breeze picks up a handful of plucked feathers from beneath the butchering bench. They flutter over Frodi’s back, then dance across the yard in a flurry of colour - red and blue and brown. Gyda turns and watches their erratic back-and-forth over the dusty ground until they scutter beneath her skirts and snag on the leather thong of her shoe. She plucks them off then, twirling them between her fingers by the shaft, first one way, then the other, the colours eddying into a muddy brown. And at last, she takes a deep breath, puffing up her cheeks into swollen mounds - lined with the sticky trails of dried tears - and lets it out again in a soft huff.

“Tell a story, Athelstan?” she asks, taking several wandering steps across the yard and leaning back against the butchering bench beside him. The breeze ruffles the feathers in her fingers, and she runs her fingertips along the speckled brown vanes of one, nudging her elbow into his.

A burst of laughter sweeps out of the longhouse door and Athelstan hunches his shoulders against the sound. He makes an effort to smile, but the expression feels malformed and ugly on his lips and he quickly lets it drop. “You and Bjorn have a guest. You might find his stories better. They will be new at least.”

Gyda cocks her head, listening for a moment to the fervid rise-and-fall of Sjurd’s muffled tale-telling, but her eyes are on Athelstan’s stained clothes and soon she purses her mouth and prods at his scratched forearm with the tip of the feather. “Tell the one about the talking horse-goat creature.”

“The donkey,” he says, truly smiling this time - though it is a small, weak one - and Gyda obliges him with a little eye-roll. He lays his knife against the bench beside the chicken parts. There is no telling now that the blood beneath his fingernails is not all from the evening meal. “I saw some once, in Francia. They are just like a small horse, but with exceedingly long ears like a hare.” And how long ago and far away that seems now, like a different life.

“The horse-rabbit creature, then,” she says, and prods him again, this time with the sharp end of the feather shaft.

Athelstan takes up the knife again. The handle is slippery with the slime of chicken guts and it takes him a moment, breathing hard through his mouth against his rebellious stomach, to get a grip on it. “Once…” he starts, spitting the word in his rush to get it out, “once, a long time ago, there was a prophet—”

“That’s like a seer?”

“Yes, a seer, whose name was Balaam. And a powerful king offered him much gold to lay a curse upon God’s people Israel…”

The sun begins to set, sinking behind the ridge of the western hills. He might be there now if he had run. Instead, here he stands once more in the dusky yard of Ragnar's longhouse as the light shifts from bright gold to orange, then shudders into a cold grey like the guttering of a candle. As if called by the lowering light, songbirds burst into chatter in the trees and the horse wickers in the larger stable. These should be peaceful noises, marking the sleepy completion of a day, yet there is a wrongness stretched over it like a shroud, the deep shadow of a coming grief. Inside the house, Sjurd's deep voice raises again into a laugh and Athelstan's chest echoes with the hollow sadness that he felt on Ragnar's boat when the sun set upon an empty sea for the first time. His throat thickens and his words trail off unfinished long before the end of the story, but Gyda doesn’t seem to notice.


	6. Chapter 6

Athelstan stands in the side entrance, leaning without leaning against the door frame. A breeze funnels through the wattle porch and brushes across the tickling sweat on the back of his neck. He twitches his head back, arching his neck into the cool air, damp curls scuffing the wood. But the draft dies down again and the heat slips back around his skin in a hot, damp blanket. His back itches and he clasps his hands in front, weaving his clammy fingers through each other in an effort not to fidget.

From the table, Gyda flicks him a worried glance, stabbing her spoon into the contents of her bowl.

“…only yesterday,” Sjurd is saying, tapping his cup of ale on the trestle boards. “A giant beast, tall at the shoulder as your waist, Gyda. The red on her coat runs grey now with age and she shows a long scar on her muzzle. Here.” He lifts the hand holding the cup and traces his forefinger across his own cheek from nose to ear.

And there was a wolf on the ridge this morning. Athelstan looks at Bjorn, sprawled at the table like a wilted leaf, his overtunic dropped on the floor beside the bench. There lingers, at the corners of his mouth and eyes, a hardness that Athelstan does not wish to agitate, so he swallows his thoughts with a loud gulp.

Sjurd rests the cup against the hinge of his jaw, where it sinks into his beard. “I call her Edel. Yes, I name her because I know her. I have seen her many times with her mate, following the elk herds up at the great lake where the river begins. Have you ever travelled there?”

Gyda shakes her head, the black of her eyes blown wide in the low light from the reed lamp flickering on the table.

"No? Think of a lake as wide as the sea between Vestfold and Alvheim," Sjurd stretches his arms wide, the cup loose in his fingers, sprinkling ale across the wooden floorboards, "and you will not be far off in your imaginings. This is where Edel lives. Yet only last night, a scarce few hours from Kattegat, she came skulking out of the dark on her great, silent paws and walked directly up to my fire. She stood as close as you and I are now. Just stood and stared, the flames gleaming on her teeth, so that they looked to drip blood."

"What did you do?" Bjorn leans across the table, sloppy and loose-limbed, resting his chin in a slick palm. With his other hand, he fumbles his own cup of ale to his lips and takes a huge gulp, missing the very edge so that some of it dribbles down the side of his mouth.

“Why, what any good host does for a guest.” Sjurd gestures with a wide-spread hand at the food-packed table - the hardening remains of the day’s bread, a chunk of Lagertha’s best cheese, the near-empty bowls of chicken stew. “I shared my meal with her, wished her the blessing of the Gods… and climbed a tree before she asked anything further of me.”

“What would you have done if there was no tree?” Gyda asks.

“I had my knife. But she had teeth and claws, strength and speed. Likely I would have made a good meal or two.” Sjurd takes the final crust of bread from the middle of the table.

Gyda straightens like an arrow-shot, lips tucking into a fierce frown. “That’s—”

And Bjorn slaps a hand over her mouth. “Stop fretting and quiet,” he hisses, as if no one else can hear him in the silent room. His fingers, glistening with the dampness of ale or sweat, press hard into her reddening cheek.

Gyda pries his hand off, scoring his skin with her fingernails. She makes a spitting noise, scrunching her nose, and scrubs at her lips with the back of her wrist. “I don’t see why Athelstan can’t eat with us. Even Father let him do that.” She glances over her shoulder at Athelstan again. He jerks his head in a small shake and shrugs one shoulder. _Don’t trouble over it._ His stomach is still roiling from preparing the meat, from the touch of slimy flesh under the knife. Her lips curl down even further.

“Father was _pretending_ so the dumb ox would talk.” Bjorn prods at the marks on his hand. His tongue slithers around his words, as ale-loose as the rest of him. “There will be no more cosseting when he returns.”

“And that, I think, brings us neatly to the question you have been holding back all this time,” Sjurd says. “Ever since I mentioned where I fared from. You are hoping for news of your parents?”

“I am hoping you know if Father’s boat has come in. You would hear of it. They are returning from the _West_. From _England._ ”

Sjurd blinks his eyes wide, the dim grey of an ocean, and turns his hard stare at Athelstan. “I had heard some rumours of this. I thought it was only talk, as usual. But it is true?” This last he directs at Bjorn, his heavy eyebrows raised. He waits for Bjorn’s bobbing, uncontrolled nod and nods to himself in response, hugging his cup against his chest with a curled hand. “That is a good thing. A very good thing. And this is how Earl Haraldson had so many strangely-dressed captives to dispose of?”

Bjorn snorts. “They were priests for their English god. Father brought them back from their temple. And they had _piles_ of treasure, just lying around, unguarded. So he brought that back too, although he wasn’t allowed to keep any. They didn’t even have a dragon. And they were all _hiding_.” Bjorn casts a scornful look at Athelstan. His blue eyes darken to black at the turn of his head away from the light. His face stretches and sinks in the unfamiliar shadow and for a moment Athelstan can see an older Bjorn, hardened and battle-worn and filled with hate. He shivers, though there is no breeze now and the sticky air has settled over his shoulders as thick and heavy as a winter cloak. Then Bjorn blinks and turns, and his features melt back into the plump churlishness of youth. “Uncle Rollo pulled one of them out of a shit hole.” His voice is high with fascinated glee. “He said he stank like a week-dead fox. And so did Rollo’s boots afterwards.”

Athelstan pictures, quite against his own volition, Godric’s caved-in head. He could pick out the exact pigments of red and white needed to match the fragments of skull and brain smeared across the wall.

Gyda screws up her face in revulsion, reflecting the sickness in Athelstan's stomach. "Bjorn, that's disgusting."

“Why do you think Rollo chose a big piece of gold, instead of a slave?” Bjorn shoves his bowl to one side with a clumsy swipe. “Priests of the manure pile all of them, and their god is the lord of cow dung.” The bowl jolts along the trestle boards and catches at the edge of the table, teetering. Athelstan strides forward, catching it, and as he does so, Bjorn grabs a rough handful of his sleeve and shakes it, making Athelstan’s hand flap like a landed fish. “With gold, a man can buy anything he needs. He can buy a slave who knows how to mend a net, instead of a coward in a dress with a silly haircut, whose god made him promise never to have sex.”

The remains of the stew slops around in the glistening bottom of the bowl in Athelstan’s hand. If only Athelstan’s hiding had been better, he would be home now, instead of here. If it had been worse, he might be lying peacefully at rest beside Brother Godric. He sighs, hard and heavy and doesn’t bother to hide it. In his weariness, he is unsure which he would prefer at this moment.

When he looks up again Sjurd is smiling, the leathery skin at the corners of his eyes furrowed as a newly ploughed field. "Well, there were no boats from the West while I was in Kattegat. Although," he waves his fingers to dismiss the children's disappointed expressions, "one came in as I left yesterday. I cannot say where it hailed from as I was out of the gates and climbing the ridge by then. It had a red sail - not big - and it had been raiding, for the dragon prow-head was still on. And some madman was clambering about on that like a spider. That's all I can tell you."

Bjorn breaks into a wide grin that dimples his cheeks. “That’s Floki. That was Father’s ship. So they should come tomorrow. I told you,” he adds to Athelstan, with a final jerk on his arm that sends the bowl out of his hand onto the floor after all. It clatters on the boards and the hounds spring up from their places to make short work of the mess in a wriggling knot of fur and wagging tails.

Sjurd gestures for more ale. "I think you will be glad of their return if the state of your slave is anything to judge by?" And he smacks the back of his huge hand against Athelstan's stomach as he pours, catching the edge of the bruise from the ewe's panicked assault with his grimy knuckles. Athelstan jolts, sucking in a breath in an audible hiss, and the ale washes out of the jug in a wave, filling Sjurd's cup to overflowing and puddling on the table.

Gyda makes a noise of choked distress and Bjorn kicks Athelstan in the shin for his transgression, glaring.

Athelstan limps back out of reach before the second attempt connects.

“There was an elk attack. A yearling,” Bjorn says, squinting murder at Athelstan over the backs of the milling hounds. The food is long gone and the older one lopes back to her place, but Frodi presses his nose to the floor, nibbling at the cracks between the boards, front legs trembling with the effort of holding his head so low. His tail whips at Athelstan’s knees but he stays where he is, pressed back against the workbench, safe from Bjorn’s unpared toenails.

Sjurd puts his cup down and wipes his hand off on his tunic, squinting. “Tell from the beginning.”

Bjorn picks at a splinter in the trestle boards. “We were fishing upriver. Vakr,” he nods in the direction of the other longhouses, and Sjurd follows his gaze to the wall behind, “had trouble with his nets, so he landed to mend them. He and Uxi had barely got out onto the bank and it just…charged out of the trees.” He shakes his head, his eyes clouded. “What was it doing there?”

Gyda fidgets with her skirts. The bloodied ones are all soaking in the washtub now, but she pulls up several handfuls of yellow wool and stares into the folds, scratching at an invisible stain with her thumb.

“Vakr couldn’t scare it away.” Bjorn gives a loose, helpless sort of shrug. “We had to climb from faering to faering and drag Uxi in over the side to get him away. His insides were fall—” and Bjorn cuts his words short, swift as a sword-stroke, swallowing hard. He rubs a trembling hand across his face, and no one says anything when he pretends that he is not scrubbing away tears that clump, briefly shining, at the corners of his eyes.

“Authny is a good healer,” Gyda says, and she lets go of her skirts to fidget with her hair instead, tucking flyaway wisps back behind her ears, “but she’s not sure he will make the night.”

“I’m sorry to hear of it. He is a friend of yours, this Uxi?”

“He’s just a little boy.” Bjorn twists his arm ring round and round on his forearm. Such a little thing to mark the difference between boy and man and the vast chasm between them. “He’s had seven winters. We have not had anything like this before. We have had accidents - Thialfi was trampled by a horse last year and broke his arm. And sometimes the babies die,” he shrugs that off as inevitable with the quick easiness of someone far removed from the experience, “but not anything like this. I don’t understand why it happened. Was it sick?”

Sjurd sits back again, slumping his huge shoulders back against the partition and scratches his chin through his beard. "One animal, lost and frightened, might attack out of that fear. It isn't unheard of. I would tell you it was the luck of the Gods, except that in my past of few weeks travelling I have encountered many such animals. Young without mothers, mates without pairs - such as my Edel - and all in unnatural places. Too far south, too far west. And now it seems you have found your own example, also." He lets out an explosive breath that shivers the curled blonde hairs on his chin. He taps at his own arm ring with two fingers. It is different to Bjorn's - a heavier brass twist - and tipped with angular horse's heads instead of wolves. "I have made a living in these parts since I gained my own arm ring, and this is something I have never encountered before. One strange thing by itself a man can blame on ill luck. Two, he becomes suspicious, _three_ … he searches for an explanation, for a reason is sure. And it is an explanation I am looking for, that is why I came this way. I am hoping for a help. And _you_ ,” he pauses to drain his cup, then tips it at Athelstan again, “ _you_ have a boat.”

***

It is close to midnight that the talking ends and the children stumble to bed, Gyda half asleep and Bjorn more than half drunk. Sjurd sprawls out on his back on the bench by the side door and falls almost instantly into a snoring sleep, his eyelids twitching. Athelstan goes out to the river shore and kneels in the quiet spot beneath the alder tree to wash off the evening’s grime and sweat.

Overhead the sky stretches out over the hills in a tapestry of black and blue, scattered with twinkling, jewelled stars. It is still cloudless but for a few scudding wisps and he can see the moonlit cast of his face on the river's rippling surface. In it, his blue eyes are dirty grey and his skin melts and boils. His hair is too long, no matter what Sjurd said, and it is now more brown than black - brightened by long days in the sun. There will be no more labouring bent-backed over his paints in the dim scriptorium, his eyes weak and squinting in the candlelight. Athelstan touches a tentative hand to the crown of his head, sliding his palm across the short crop of curls in the centre. They are well past the maddening itch of regrowth now, and similar enough to the rest that he forgets his fading tonsure much of the time. How long will it be before there is nothing left at all of Brother Athelstan? He snatches his hand away, scrubbing his palm across his tunic as if to rid himself of a shock, but he cannot scrub away the thought now that it has come. It churns up again that low ache in his heart into something sharper and harder, like the stabbing dry thorns of the gorse. Brother Athelstan is fading away, and he is not sure what exactly is replacing him.

He gets up, stopping part way to suck in a desperate lungful of air like a man drowning. It is not much cooler outside than in and each breath is stagnant with damp heat. It has the smell of a storm on it too - the heavy taste-smell of water on hot stones, of rain that has not yet come. He turns about, his heels sinking into the sand, casting him off-balance. The settlement is silent now, the longhouses dark and still, gathered in among gorse and tree like so many fat wood pigeons at roost.

Midnight. At home, the bells will be ringing for the Night Office and the final straggling oblates and novices will be rushing out across the yard and into the chapel to take their places under Sigeric’s stern glare. Athelstan feels the call of it in his bones. He pulls his cross from beneath his tunic, closing his fingers tight around it, and presses his fist to his mouth. But he cannot join in with the words. Somewhere in the sighing of the woods they become distant and are lost and Athelstan remembers instead the faering’s blood-drunk wood and Lindisfarne’s blood-soaked dirt and wonders if anyone is saying the Office at all.

Behind him, the soft snick of a latch jolts him out of his thoughts like a thunderbolt in the quiet. He blinks the world back into focus, resolves the soft edges from trance back to reality just in time to catch the flitting grey shape stepping out through the doorway of Vakr’s longhouse. Inside, the lamplight flares at the draft, casting a momentary sunset around the figure. Then the door is pulled to and Rannveyg marches across Vakr’s small yard and grasps the boundary fence with both hands. She leans forward on it, hands tight and elbows locked in an outward splay - a black-winged crow, poised to take flight.

“This is not what I _meant_ ,” she hisses out into the darkness. “Freyja! This is not what I asked for. Do you hear me?”

Athelstan’s neck is stiff from bending, his body aches from holding still. He is out of the practice of quietude and once again his body betrays him, his knee juddering out of its locked position and scraping his foot sideways across a stone with a harsh rasp. Rannveyg jumps and twists towards him, her shoulders pulling upwards into a protective hunch. When she sees him, she huffs a quiet laugh and lets them droop back down again, stiffening her arms once more against the fence.

“Oh, but _you_ hear me, Ragnar’s English slave. The Gods only listen when they want to.”

Athelstan lets go of his cross and it thuds against his collarbone, a small ache amongst all the others. Its rounded edges have carved their outline into his palm, cracked by the lines that already run there. Head ducked, he rubs at the shape of it, but he hears the rustle and scrape as Rannveyg toes her shoes off, and her light, barefoot steps crossing the yard towards him.

“The boy is sleeping,” she says, and though it isn’t a whisper, it is quiet enough that he looks up to confirm his hearing. “A good sleep for now, not too deep. Tomorrow will tell if he will live.”

Athelstan nods and ducks his head again, almost chin to chest, each breath squashed and uncomfortable in his throat, waiting for her to leave. At the edge of his vision, her bare toes press down into the sand. She sighs, little more than a breath, and picks his cross up off his chest. Her fingers are small but muscular and chill with damp, the nailbeds red from a fresh scrubbing. She runs the pad of her thumb over the pewter with a single, slow swipe, then tucks it back into his tunic and plucks the linen straight at his shoulders, like a mother neatening a child.

He takes a step back, out of reach, knocking his shoulder against the alder trunk. The drooping branches form a cage about him, the river murmurs at his heels and Rannveyg stands at the entrance, hair falling in knotted waves over one shoulder.

“You were a priest, there in England?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t say ‘I am’ or ‘I was’. He is no longer sure which is true.

“And what do your Gods demand of you? What blood payments must you make to gain their blessing?” She holds her shoes by the heels, dangling them against her thigh. The toes are worn almost as much as Athelstan’s - the leather near-white.

Athelstan blinks in surprise, considering the question. “Nothing. We just pray.”

Her lips twitch, neither up nor down, just a subtle show of incomprehension. "No, but what do you give, for your requests to be granted?"

“My God does not work in that way. Our sacrifices are different.”

Rannveyg stares at him. “Such as?” she prompts, tapping her shoes against her leg again.

“We…” Athelstan finds his hands grasping the air, as if to shape the answer into being, and shrugs them, “…we give up our possessions, our desires, our needs. Our freedoms.” And at sixteen winters, half of those spent within the walls of the priory, those vows seemed so easy to make. He had no possessions anyway, no family, no trade, no prospect of anything other than slow starvation or slavery. He gave nothing and gained everything. And now he must give up everything in exchange for nothing. “And we tell others about Him. That is the most of it.” There were still Brothers in Ribe, when Athelstan left it, toiling over their little herb garden at the back of their little hut, as Athelstan toils over Lagertha’s. Is there any more hope of transplanting God into this hostile place than there is in their delicate English seedlings? But perhaps they are better at it than Athelstan.

She narrows her eyes and her stare grows intense, scalding. She unpicks him with her eyes, trying to find - what? - the unravelling corner of a lie? "You have a strange God. What could he want with those things?"

There are answers he can give, he has studied the verses, has copied them out letter by painstaking letter. But when he tries to speak them now, they stick in his throat, all jagged and wrong. The answers are hollow now - a yawning chasm of anger and doubt - and he is hollow along with them. "The men return tomorrow," he says instead, after a brief, choking moment, "we have had news of Ragnar's ship."

It’s Rannveyg’s turn to look down, slipping on a smiling grimace. She curls her arm tight around her stomach, her shoes resting now on the curve of her hip. “Then tomorrow will tell a great many things.” She fists her left hand in her skirts and lifts them enough that her ankles peek out from beneath the length of her dress, taking a dancing step backwards, heel-to-toe. The sand collapses in around her as she moves, erasing her traces from the ground. “Our Gods are greedy and cruel, Athelstan, are they not? They take everything with one hand and give nothing with the other.” The thought echoes his own so uncannily that he jerks his head up, catching her eye. And there again is the bitter twist of grief on her face and she presses her forearm harder into the round of her stomach. “And they are no more apt to keep to a bargain than any mortal. Perhaps we would do better not to ask at all.” And with that she steps back again, spinning at last away from him and taking her dark gaze with her, slipping into the shadow of the gorse.


	7. Chapter 7

Ten feet out, as the riverbed plummets into murky depths, the water darkens from the swirling grey of patterned steel to a bruised blue-black. Bjorn, his clothes whipping about him in the wind, pushes at the steerboard and the faering tilts into a northward turn. Hunched and crammed between fore -thwart and -rib, Athelstan feels the momentary judder-jerk of the faster water snatching at the sweeping prow. Then Bjorn adjusts the steerboard, pointing the faering alongside the main run of the river, and Sjurd unfurls the remainder of the sail. It snaps full with the noise of a cracking whip and the faering picks up its pace, slicing through the water as a hawk skims through the air. It feels like dreams of flying do and a nervous excitement bubbles up in Athelstan's stomach at the speed. He grips the sides of the faering and through his fingers thrums the slip-slide of the strakes moulding themselves to the water, groaning against the rivets.

Apart from his recent voyage from England, Athelstan has not been in a boat for a very long time. Leaving Lindisfarne meant walking the causeway between tides - a deadly journey if misjudged, or if high winds brought the sea in faster and deeper - and Athelstan completed the crossing with wet feet and a pounding heart more than once. Otherwise, there was the one winter while they were still oblates that he and Cenwulf escaped the priory after Compline and stole a boat. Neither of them knew how to row and the night was black as tar, moonless. They were lucky to fetch up against the outcrop below the royal fortress rather than miss all land in the dark. They were lucky not to be dashed to pieces on the rocks. But the few minutes they spent in that turbid water were a frozen, terrifying eternity all the same.

The river water that licks at his feet now has an edge of warmth from the morning sun and sits clear as a mountain spring in the bottom of the faering. He taps the toes of his shoes down into the twinkling surface and a tumble of glassy beads rolls over the leather and back into the hull. Between Athelstan’s feet, Frodi rumbles low in his throat and sits up in a spidery splay of limbs, squeezing sodden paws backwards across the centre strakes and smacking the side of his face into Sjurd’s belongings where they are lashed in dry safety to the thwart. Up now, his ears flapping like furry sails of his own, Frodi leans his muscle-lined shoulder against Athelstan’s knee and drops his mouth agape to catch the gusting wind. It carries the fresh tang of a long-ago winter, of snowflakes caught and melting on an outstretched tongue. It carries the crisp sweetness of summer-washed linen dried beneath drifting apple blossom. And it flicks Athelstan’s too-long curls into his eyes.

Perched on the aft thwart beside Sjurd, Gyda reflects Athelstan's squinting frown. She tucks her dress skirts tight under her knees, sitting on her hands for good measure, and bows her head forward. Her plait slips down over her shoulder, surrounded by a frizz of escaped hair as is usual, the tufts fluttering about her face like trees in a storm. Between the rush of the wind, the creaking of the boat and the crackling sail, the noise of their passage is too much for conversation and Gyda, after a brief, companionable grimace, drops her eyes to her feet and passes the time rolling them from side to side on the craggy tops of the ballast rocks.

Sjurd seems unbothered, leaning with his arms crossed atop his knees and staring out over Athelstan's whipping curls at the course ahead. The river runs directly north now, ploughing a wrinkled valley between the outstretched fingers of pine-clustered hills. On the west, these fast become looming cliffs cut with crevasses like knife wounds, so deep and dark that lines of ice pierce through them from summit to valley floor, like the roots of a giant tree. Past the first of these, the faering slipping between the shadowy teeth of the land, the eastern bank draws back in and flattens against the water. Here, a decrepit pier peeks out from beneath a spread of drooping willows. Some planks are missing, one piling is rotten and beginning to fold in on itself like a melting candle end, and nettles spring up - so many slanting towers - through the gaps at the waterside.

Athelstan leans his chin against the side of the faering. From the sunbaked wood rises the soft scent of linseed oil, rubbed deep into the grain, and the warmth sends a wave of sleepiness through him, his eyes sweeping through a single, slow blink. There is neither sight nor smell of hearth smoke between the willows’ golden garlands, no baying hound protesting their passage, only what might be the fleeting glimpse of a figure or simply the mottled trunk of a tree turned to motion by their own gliding progress. This habitation, like Ragnar’s, is being clawed back by the wild. Inch by inch, structure by structure, the woods are remaking themselves.

It is the last of humanity that Athelstan sees. The willows slip away as if they are the ones caught in a current, their motley woodland bubbling downriver, foaming up around the bare back of the eastern ridge. It seems to grow as the wind sweeps the faering onward, a recumbent giant, all fissured skin and gnarled spine, the slope of its naked shoulder rising up out of the trees to scrape a bleak grey summit against the sky. Then, quite suddenly, the crook of its elbow parts the cladding pine forest and stretches out across the water, and the faering slips beneath it into dusk-dark shadow.

Athelstan rolls his head back, squashing the tip of his ear into the wood. The wind catches its breath at the same time as he does, tasting on dry lips the cave-damp chill. Overhead, the rock ripples, less than a foot above the mast and its drooping sail. The weight of the rock suspended above seems to press down the very air around them and Athelstan’s inward breath sits heavy in his lungs. It ends as suddenly as it begins, one moment tracing the depths of the earth, the next the endless line of the northern face stretching up into a perfect, blue horizon. And a raven, dancing through the air like a tumbler performing at a feast.

***

The sun is almost midway across the sky when Bjorn at last points the faering to the eastern bank, bumping the prow onto a low swathe of grass, and they all clamber out from sweltering sunlight into sticky shade and the pooling heat of the pine forest.

Gyda leans against the faering, combing her fingers through the tangled, hazel cobweb of her hair. “Yours is no better,” she protests when she catches Athelstan smiling at her efforts. “You look like a bird nest in a winter tree. One day something will land on you and lay an egg.” But she reaches up and plucks at his stray curls anyway and he bows his head for her, wriggling leaden toes in his shoes until they come back to life with a slow, tingling pain.

Bjorn drops Sjurd’s belongings onto the prickly, yellow grass and hops out. “Where will you go?”

“The lake first, I think,” Sjurd says, squinting upriver again. He weighs his pack in one hand as if judging a cabbage at market, “and find out why the beasts have abandoned it. After that, who can tell? Hunting takes you where it takes you, especially the hunting of a mystery.” He turns back to them and, with a quiet, preparatory grunt, swings his pack round and onto his shoulders and reaches for his other things. Once he is ready - back bristling like a loaded hedgehog - he scratches his scruffy beard and rolls onto the balls of his feet, springing his heels up and down on the dry grass. “I thank you for your most excellent welcome. And all the more heartily for this favour you do me. You have saved me several weeks of hard walking,” he waves a hand at the opposite bank which rises straight up in solid rock to a high and windswept ridge, “I will be sure to repay you with a good tale the next time I pass your way.”

“I count on it,” Bjorn says, returning Sjurd’s formal nod with a little one of his own - though his neck is stiff and unsure as a rusted hinge. “Father will have some new ones, but then we’ll only have _Athelstan’s_. _”_

"Then I shall be sure to bring more than one." Sjurd lifts a hand in brief farewell and departs in his swift, crunch-pad pace northward into the trees. Soon all that is visible of him are momentary glimpses of his pack and furs peeking out from behind the orderly brown pine trunks, bouncing at his stride, then nothing at all but the whispering crackles of his footsteps in the quiet, fading fast into the distance.

Bjorn stares after him, a sullen frown nudging his lips down and his brows crooked. Sjurd’s unexpected appearance has consumed everything since yesterday afternoon - a welcome enough distraction from the earlier horrors - and now his disappearance is like the sudden cutting of a cord, dropping them - floundering - back into normality. The yellow day seems languid and dull after all the excitement.

“I suppose we should go now,” Gyda says, though she sounds as disappointed as Bjorn looks. “The bread has risen too long already. It will be tough as leather and sour as pickled herring unless Rannveyg checks on it for me.”

Bjorn shakes himself and stretches his back with a little groan. “You haven’t been steering all morning. I need a rest.”

“You are not the only one with arms. Athelstan can row. I can steer, I know how.”

"I need a rest," Bjorn says again in a severe tone, and he plumps himself down on the hot grass, laying out with his hands behind his head.

Gyda frowns down at him - his eyes are screwed shut in stubborn resistance to the sun - then gives up with a visible slump of her shoulders. “Let’s explore then,” and she tugs at Athelstan’s sleeve, “I’ve never been this far upriver.”

A short wander north along the grass brings them to a mixed stand of alder and bird cherry. They are tangled as an excited throng, reaching through each other to the stretch out over the water as those fighting to touch Jesus’ robe. Gyda climbs in amongst them to hop from bole to bole in a lazy circle, ducking under the drooping bunches of bright green fruit.

“What do you think Father will bring back this time?”

What, and whom? There is a lump in his throat again, thick and sticky, and Athelstan gulps it down. He leans his shoulder against the nearest tree and winds his arm in a hug around its thin, white trunk. Deep within the cluster of trees, Gyda walks along the trunk of a cherry that has grown flat to the ground, her arms spread out wide like a little, hopping bird.

"Hexham is a rich town," he says, leaving the rest to her imagination. But King Aelle must be alert and the townspeople would not have been weaponless this time and Athelstan hopes… He does not know what he hopes.

Within the trees, Gyda’s step falters and she stops, examining her feet with more interest than necessary. “Maybe he will bring home enough gold that he never has to leave again?” Her voice is low as a whispering breeze - perhaps she fears that speaking her wish aloud will break it - and she sweeps her hazel eyes up at Athelstan in a hopeful glance.

And he looks away and down, tightening his hand on the tree trunk, his tongue solid and immoveable. To Gyda, Ragnar is merely ‘Father’ - the man who tells thrilling tales and terrible jokes and tickles her until she cannot breathe from laughing. For her, his danger is a protection. She has not seen him as Athelstan has seen him, from the other side of the knife. Ragnar’s boat could be overflowing with treasures and he would still not be satisfied, not until he has plundered the earth of every glittering thing and filled its seas with blood.

Eventually, Gyda gives up waiting for him to speak and goes back to her circling climb. Athelstan's face is hot, and he presses his cheek against the cool tree trunk, breathing in the quiet air and the distant hum of a fat bee exploring the branches overhead. Far away in the southern sky, the shadow of the raven still spins, dropping in spiralling dives and swooping back up again, looping around and around in silent revelry. After a while, a hawk appears behind it and there is a sudden, sky-bound tussle, though it ends as quickly as it starts, with the raven dropping towards the river like a stone. At the last moment, it checks its fall, wings out-spread, skimming across the surface of the water. When it climbs back up again, much closer now, leaving the glistening grey shape of the hawk in the far distance, its tail is missing a feather. The whole event takes but a moment, without breaking the silence, and the peaceful quiet soaks warm into Athelstan's bones. There is precious little peace back at the farm. The house feels like a wooden prison, even with just three people in it, the walls pressing in on his chest at each breath. And he fears he will fare poorly come winter, trapped in that small space with Ragnar day upon day and month upon month.

That thought sparks a remembrance and he asks, “Gyda? What is a leysingr? Sjurd used the word but I do not know it.”

“Oh,” she wobbles to a halt in the fork of a tree and peers at him around its grey trunk, “that is a freed slave.” Athelstan gapes and she blinks back at him, owl-like. “You do not have them in England?”

“No!” he splutters out all his shock in the word. “At least, only very rarely.” Freedom in England is an uncommon Christian charity or a deathbed manumission, never spoken of so casually. How can it be more possible here, where Bjorn’s hound has more value than he does? “How?”

“I… do not know exactly all the law, I’ve never met a slave before you. Father can tell you.”

A small, bitter laugh chokes out of his throat and Athelstan summons up a cough to disguise it, pressing the side of his fist to his mouth. What could he even say? ‘Ragnar, I would like to be a free man’? He can well imagine how that would end.

“I do know that there is a feast and— oh!” Gyda launches herself back from the tree as if burned, her face wide open in an expression of abject horror. In her haste, her feet slip from their footing and she drops to the ground, one knee scraping down the trunk. The hollow thud of bone striking wood and the scratch of tearing skin makes Athelstan wince but Gyda does not seem to notice, only stumbles back a few steps, smoothing her skirts back into place, ignoring the drip of bright red blood gathering at the top of her sock. Instead, she lifts her palms and takes a shivering breath. “Athelstan, look!” He steps through the arch of trees into the copse, wrinkling his nose at the bitter cat-urine scent that sits heavy in the air about Gyda’s tree. Her hands are dusted with flakes of black, thick as the scales of a snake. “Look.” And she waves her hands at the tree.

A deer has been at it, stripping the bark in long sections and gouging through into the stinking wood, but the gouges are stamped with blood - black and glossy in the muted light, and there is blood splattered in the grass beneath. It takes a moment for understanding to burst through the confusion, but when it does anger bubbles up with it and Athelstan chokes it down. It boils beneath the surface and Athelstan is not as gentle as he could be when he snatches Gyda's elbow - the small bones of her arm slotting into his palm - and tugs her back out of the trees towards the faering. She trips along beside him without argument, scrubbing her palms against each other with frenzied violence. Uxi's blood flakes off into bloody dust and drifts onto her skirts.

Bjorn glances up at them as they approach, notes Gyda’s obvious displeasure and the mess on her clothes with a flick of his blue eyes, then goes back to stringing his bow, bending the bowstave smoothly against the back of his thigh to slip the string into place. The casual turn of his head is nothing short of a dismissal.

Gyda tugs her elbow from Athelstan’s hand and gestures with a sharp swipe at Bjorn’s belt, which now, along with leather bottle and pouch, also carries his sax and fire-making kit and a small bag of arrows, none of which Athelstan remembers putting into the faering that morning.

Athelstan can no longer withhold a noise of deep irritation. “We don’t have time to hunt, Bjorn.” He glares up at the sun, as if he does not already know its position in the sky, and there it hangs at its midpoint, bright and accusing. Ragnar and Lagertha might well have returned by now and most of the day’s chores are yet to be done.

But Bjorn steps out of the bow walks away downriver without responding. He whistles, two clear tones, and Frodi follows in a scramble, his big paws trampling all over a trail of old, dry hoofprints crushed into the grass. After a few moments, the yellow blades rise in again in a slow reversal of their genuflection, covering the scars.

Athelstan clamps his mouth shut against the words of anger seething behind his teeth and hurries after, his hands swinging in fists at his side. Gyda trots along after him, muttering in a breathless voice. They are quickly under the pines, the forest sweeps clear to the edge of the bank once they pass the faering, and the swathes of dropped needles rasp between their shoes and the hard ground. Ahead, Bjorn strides between the trees, the bow bouncing on his shoulder. His gait is not as easy as Sjurd’s or Ragnar’s, more a heavy lope, thumping harder on the right than the left, but he weaves through the trees quickly enough.

Athelstan shortens his steps and slips into a trot. “Bjorn!”

Bjorn’s shoulders raise and stiffen but he merely ducks his head and speeds up, hefting the bow back up his shoulder.

Gyda glances back towards the faering, teeth imprinting her bottom lip. But the forest has already swallowed the view - there is nothing but trees in every direction, and the gurgling of the river coming from somewhere behind thick banks of nettles to their right. “I promised I would help Authny.” Her wavering voice carries in the quiet.

Bjorn spins on his heels, throwing his arms out in obvious exasperation. “Then you should not have insisted on coming upriver.” His bow slips off his shoulder and down his arm until he catches the string in his palm and plants the end of the stave in a patch of pine seedlings. “Now would you both _shut up_? Go back to the faering and wait.”

Gyda scowls and comes to a crunching halt a few paces from him. “You cannot tell me what to do. You are not in charge, Athelstan is.”

“Athelstan, Athelstan,” Bjorn replies in a mocking sing-song. “Why can’t you make friends with someone that _isn’t_ a slave, Gyda?” He picks his bow up and flicks Gyda’s plait over her shoulder with it. Her head jerks backwards, her hair caught on the top nock.

She growls deep in her throat and grabs her plait in both hands, working it free. "You think you can do whatever you like!" And she snaps a leg out at Bjorn, catching him in the calf even as he steps to one side. He stumbles onto one knee but uses his position to swing the bottom limb of the bowstave up into her raised ankle, sweeping her leg upwards and knocking her off balance. She twists as she falls, her dress skirts spiralling in the air, and thuds to the ground on palm and elbow with a loud grunt. She doesn't stay down though, Bjorn has over-reached, and Gyda shoves herself sideways in a single, smooth movement, rolling beneath his outstretched arm. Before he can react, she lands a solid, open-handed strike to his chin that snaps his teeth together and his head backwards. He collapses onto his back and his flailing arm fetches Gyda a glancing blow across the ear with the bowstave.

“Ow! Bjorn!”

“That is enough.” Athelstan steps between them the moment there is room to do so and snatches the bow from Bjorn’s shock-loosed hand. Bjorn splutters and scrambles up from the ground, scattering pine needles everywhere. He juts his chin up, his jaw muscles rolling tight, and stands in a fighting stance, feet shoulder-width apart, hands clenched. It would be more impressive if not for the large flakes of bark stuck in his froward hair, and the large red mark blooming on the underside of his jaw that is certain to become an impressive bruise by the morning.

Bjorn flaps a hand at Gyda without looking. “There is nothing wrong with her. See?”

Gyda sits against the trunk of a tree, tugging pine needles out of the tangled knot of her hair. She pauses to stick her tongue out at him. “You are such a boy.”

This Bjorn does not acknowledge, only crossing his arms at Athelstan, pressing his fists into the crooks of his elbows. “This is how we do things here. _We_ don’t hide under our beds when we should be fighting.”

Athelstan takes a shaky breath, tasting the acrid sting of pine in the back of his throat. In it, there are echoes of the bitter iron stench of blood-washed ground, the distant choke of burning wood. He lets it all back out again with a sigh through his teeth.

Bjorn takes the opportunity of Athelstan’s irritated silence to snatch the bow back. “I am going to find that elk and kill it before it attacks someone else.”

“Your father can take care of that.” If it even needs taking care of. So far as Athelstan knows there are no more settlements around for many miles. But Bjorn is already bristling, taking the type of long, chest-puffing breath that heralds a threatening outburst.

Athelstan rolls his eyes up to the tree canopy. “Bēode me gethyldmódnesse!” _Give me patience!_

Gyda snorts a laugh and Bjorn, clearly guessing that he is the object of her mirth, ascends quickly towards rage. “I do not need Father to do it for me,” he spits, “I am a man, I can do it myself!”

These Northmen and their pride, and Athelstan is the one who suffers for it. “No,” he says.

And Bjorn’s face constricts into incredulity. “What?”

“Ragnar gave me charge—”

“—Of the _farm_ ,” Bjorn interrupts, stepping closer.

“And of your safety. Neither of which is served by this foolishness. We are going back now.”

“How are you going to stop me? You cannot lay a hand on me. You cannot do anything except talk. Father only brought you home so you could work in the shit with all the other animals.” Bjorn shoves him, all his young outrage concentrated in the strength of his arms. Athelstan is knocked back a step in surprise and Bjorn presses the advantage, using his forearm as a battering ram across Athelstan’s chest and slamming the heel of his other hand into Athelstan’s stomach, right in the painful centre of the swollen bruise. Athelstan folds like a snapped leaf, gasping and clutching at the pain. He stumbles back another step, his foot goes over the edge of the bank, he slips, and he’s gone, tumbling through the nettles and down the sharp incline. He comes to a thumping, head-snapping stop, face-first in the rocky shallows of the river. Bjorn’s laughter trickles down from the top of the bank.

Athelstan pushes himself to his knees, coughing up burning water from burning lungs. His head spins from the tumbling fall and he overbalances backwards, landing with a second splash in the freezing water. It sweeps closed over his eyes and mouth and in an instant the sky blurs into a distant, hazy horizon. Athelstan crushes his eyes shut and slaps his hands down onto rolling pebbles.

The wild Northman - Floki - laughed too when Ragnar threw Cenwulf's stiff body into the fjord. That day was bright and calm, the water blue as azure after it closed over Cenwulf's frozen face, and Floki giggled his madman's laugh and the oars splashed pure silver. For weeks afterwards, Athelstan felt drenched in cold at the sound of the faerings sliding onto the shore or the bucket splashing down into the well.

He opens his eyes and pushes himself up and onto his knees. His clothes are leaden with the weight of water, his tunic sagging under the arms and dripping thick brown waterfalls back into the river. On the bank, Bjorn collapses in laughter into the furrow of Athelstan’s fall, pressing his hand deep into his side, his lower ribs jumping over his thumb. Gyda shoves him elbow-first into the nettles, hushing him.

Athelstan frowns at them, then down at the water. It was clear when they moored the faering, clear as glass. He drops a cupped hand into the surface flow. Gritty silt, like wetted flour, streams between his fingers and his palm catches a handful of twigs and leaves. He dips his hand down again, releasing them, raises it and catches another handful. He sucks the dripping river water from his bottom lip and staggers to his feet. In the main run of the river, a huge branch skims along the rugged water, trailing a gaping wound of white flesh, its smaller leaf-filled limbs reaching out into the air like the grasping hands of corpses.

“Flood,” he whispers, a sibilance so quiet that he barely hears himself over the river’s rumbling. He shuts his fingers around the slippery grime in his palm and blinks in pure confusion. “Flood.” What now? A small log bumps his leg at the knee. The edge of the river is beginning to crowd with small detritus. “God help us,” he breathes. Athelstan spins towards the bank and shouts, “Climb!” even as he throws himself onto the rock-hard dirt, scrambling back up through the gouged tracks of his downward travel.

Bjorn exhales a final chuckle and kicks his heel down through the dusty rut. “What are you doing?”

Crumbs of dirt and tiny stones cascade down the bank and over Athelstan’s hands. He hauls himself to the top. “Move!”

Bjorn turns wide-eyed and scuttles backwards out of the way, crabwise. Athelstan weaves around him, snatches at Gyda’s arm and keeps going, tugging her with him.

“What? Wait! Have you gone mad?” Bjorn grabs a handful of Athelstan’s tunic, dragging at him. “Let go of her!” He digs his heels in and pine needles spray up over his shoes in two comical waves for just a moment before he trips and tumbles forward and catches himself in a trot.

Bjorn’s clutching fist is a warm spot between Athelstan’s shoulder-blades, pulling the neck of his tunic up and across his throat. He speeds up, across the flat ground to the rising slope of the hill, dodging between the pine trees and an undergrowth that seems to have sprung from nowhere to snatch at Gyda’s skirts.

“A… st’n?” Gyda’s chest is heaving with the effort of keeping up with his pace.

The distant hills begin to hiss.

Bjorn glances over his shoulder and back again, his face drifting from tight anger to anxious confusion. He lets go of Athelstan’s tunic and leaps over a bramble stem, cheeks puffing. On his shoulder, the bow bounces in complete arrhythmia to his feet. “What is going on?”

They hit the slope of the hill at a full run and Athelstan flings Gyda up ahead of him. “Climb. Do not stop.” And he heaves himself up behind her. Bjorn matches him, grabbing at any handhold he can find - branches and saplings and the fat, scratching stems of woody shrubs. Frodi appears on Athelstan’s left flank, trotting upwards with his tongue lolling out of one side of his open mouth.

“What are we doing?” Bjorn demands again.

Athelstan shakes his head, sharp with irritation, and checks over his shoulder. From their new height, the river peeks from behind the smaller trees - mud brown from bank to bank and rising. In places, the forest floor seems to stream with movement. A family of voles skitters between Frodi's feet and disappears into the bushes above them. Gyda stands on a mouse that misjudges its darting path beneath her. It crunches and squeaks and Gyda utters a noise somewhere between annoyance and pity, then kicks it aside.

The hiss becomes a roar. Water bubbles up around the roots of the lowest trees, swirls up around the trunks and spreads long, greedy fingers across the flat ground, raising up a soup of pine needles.

“Keep going,” Athelstan says. And already those fingers are at the foot of the slope and clawing upwards and the foaming white chaos of the river breaks the bank below in a wave.

Above him, Gyda jerks to a halt with a surprised grunt and collapses forward onto the slope, stiff as a felled tree. Her hands fly to her dress, yanking at her skirts and she kicks out at the ground.

Athelstan hauls himself up beside her. "What—" something stabs sharp claws into his ankle, and he stumbles away along the slope, stamping down on the unseen assailant with his other foot. A bramble stem cracks beneath the heel of his shoe. The same bramble stem - near half an inch thick - that is sewn up in Gyda's skirts by the needle-sharp thorns, gathering the fabric tight about her knees like a tied sack. He stamps on the stem again and it snaps in half, but the joint holds with the thick sinew of outer flesh, lashing Gyda to the ground just as effectively as chain or rope. He draws his knife and slices through the rest of it. Gyda slips at the release and twists about, teetering on her heels.

“No good,” she says, “I think there are more.”

Athelstan drops to his knees and delves his hand into the dusty bank, digging out the nest of bramble stems that Gyda has wandered into and begins hacking at them with his knife. They are thick and dried to hard wood, some with thorns the size of Athelstan’s thumb.

“Hold still.” Bjorn slides around beneath them, grappling both earth and Athelstan’s clothing without discrimination along the way.

“Bjorn, the water,” Gyda says, her rising panic displayed in the tightness of her voice.

“I _know_.” Bjorn drops one foot into the churning flood and grabs at Gyda’s skirts, ripping the thorns out backwards from between the strands of wool and linen. The ground is half dust and half mud now and his foot slips down into it, dropping him knee-deep into the churning debris that hugs the edge of the roaring torrent.

Athelstan leans over and pulls Bjorn up by the neck of his tunic. “Go. I will do it.” And he slips down to take Bjorn’s place, pushing him further up the slope with a firm hand between his shoulder-blades, his knife fisted in the other.

Gyda tugs at her skirts, her face set in determination, her lip caught between her teeth.

The water tumbles around Athelstan’s knees, tugging at his legs, and he wedges one knee into the muddy bank. If the brambles won’t come out… “I will have to cut your dress.” Athelstan grabs her skirts just above the tangled bend of her knee and pulls the fabric away from her skin.

“Hurry,” is all she says.

Then Bjorn draws a sharp breath of alarm, there is a thump that Athelstan feels rather than hears, rippling through his fingers and up into the bones of his chest like the hollow booming of a church bell. Then silence.


	8. Chapter 8

_Let there…_ The voice booms. It thrums and throbs and shivers through Athelstan’s bones and buffets him in the black nothingness between the stars. _Let there be_ — The voice grows and shakes and turns to a boiling fire in Athelstan’s chest, all at once expanding and collapsing, making and unmaking the very fibres of his burning lungs.

He is twisted together and pulled apart, each knotted strand of his flesh screaming, _God, save me!_ And he throws out a molten hand into the frozen void, grasping at nothing. Arms outstretched, he kisses the earth and his tombstone groans into place, crushing him down into the depths of his grave.

 _Lazarus, awake_. The earth pours into him, filling his throat and spilling back out. He is the shell of a bursting acorn and the tree grows inside. Its roots dig down, down through his stomach, its leaves choke out from the maw of his mouth. _Deus meus, Deus meus, ut quid derelequisti me?_

 _Let there be light!_ And there is light, a Damascene blindness. Air punches back into his lungs. He swallows down greedy mouthfuls, each one a wondrous fire. The buzzing clouds drift away, leaving spots of stippled grey across his vision. Somewhere, beneath the thunder, a dog barks. Athelstan lays his cheek against the crackling earth and simply breathes.

“Athelstan!”

Turning his head makes everything spin with dizzying rapidity. As oblates, sometimes they would play games of rolling down the dunes onto the beach and the world would revolve with this same bumping disorientation, ending with a mouthful of sand. Athelstan coughs up water now and his teeth sift out the grit and silt and tree bark as a net sifts fish. He spits it out into the muddy river that rages around his chin.

“Athelstan!”

This time he closes one eye and inches his head about. Water streams down his face and hangs onto his eyelashes in fat drops. Bjorn’s shape, when he finds it, is blurred and distorted - merely a squat, dark bundle perched on a rocky ledge above the river’s churning surface.

From a thousand miles away, the shape puts out an arm and says, “Give me Gyda.”

That is perplexing. He tries to croak an answer from a throat stripped raw by the water. “I… do not…” …know where she is, …think she survived. Lagertha will never forgive him for this. He rubs his face on his shoulder, clearing the worst of the water from his eyes, and turns back again.

And there is Gyda’s little bobbing head, right beside him. Both of her arms are thrown over the same wide trunk, her collarbones cutting up through her sodden clothing and fluttering with her gasping breaths. “Don’t let go!” The open-mouthed contortion of her face reflects her utter panic, her eyes blown to pure black.

One of his hands is clamped about her upper arm, clenched so tight as to bite against the bone. He gives a little shake of his head. He could not loosen his fingers even if he chose to. They are frozen in place. “I—” Something smashes into the back of his knees with bone-bruising force and he goes under again. He tightens his arm around the tree in a jerking reflex, clawing his fingers into the cracks. His shoulder snaps taut - a thief at the end of a rope - and Athelstan slams up into the trunk from beneath. His chest hits first with a hollow thump, then his face, and he is trapped there below the water, the swirling madness rushing about him. He kicks out and his foot hits something hard, hard enough to push against. He breaks the surface once more, water streaming down his face, his cheek ablaze. The floodwater batters him against the tree.

On the ledge, Bjorn stretches out further over the water. He twitches his fingers at Athelstan with a jerking impatience. Frodi lies beside him and Bjorn’s other hand is fisted in his fur, anchoring himself in his precarious position.

“It is not far,” Athelstan coughs out.

Gyda flattens purple lips around her chattering teeth. “Far _enough.”_

Bjorn is ten feet away, at least. It might as well be a thousand miles. The juniper trunk twists straight across the surface towards the bank for seven of those, after which it disappears beneath, leaving a gap of tumultuous white water. If they can span that, they can climb onto the cresting edge of the root ball, but that still leaves a perilous backwards twist to reach the ledge and Bjorn’s helping hand. One slip during any of that small distance and…

“Can you get up on top?” The tree is stripped of its branches on all but the far side where a few stubborn offshoots wave tremulous clumps of needles and blue-green berries just above the raging foam. Walking along it would be safer. But even as he asks the river buffets against the small of his back and tugs at his legs, threatening to pull him back beneath the surface and sweep him away. And he knows her answer before she says it.

“No.” Gyda eyes the distance ahead of them, her expression stiff. She bobs her head in a sharp nod, her chin dipping into the water, answering some question spoken only in her own mind. Her drenched hair draws spiderwebs across her forehead and cheek. “Let’s go.”

The moment she moves, sliding her arms along the tree, the water grabs at her. Athelstan can feel the strength of it through his grip on her arm, how it pulls and pushes and hits and rages, tugging in every direction with a hundred angry hands. His own hand cramps tighter, fighting against it. It’s all they can do together to keep her head above the surface, and she chokes down several large mouthfuls of water in trying. When she has gained a foot, she stops and lays her forehead against the tree trunk, screwing her mouth and eyes shut against the splashing water and panting in air through her nose. Several dead leaves are stranded in the twisting web of her hair.

She turns her face towards him. Beneath the river’s strange markings her skin has blanched so white that she is almost translucent, the skin of her hands like a gossamer web overlaying her bones. “Your turn.”

Athelstan digs his fingers into the skin of the tree and hoists himself up a few inches. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to brace his arm across the higher slope of the trunk. The water holds him there with a battering strength and he cannot take a full breath against it. “Hold tight.” And he lets go, using his elbow as a pivot to slip his hand further along. That brief weakness is all the river needs to drag him down again. He grabs a new hold just in time, arm jerking, slamming back into the tree. His mouth slips into the river’s filthy foam.

Again and again they move, one inch at a time. Up, breathless, move and pull and jerk and slam. Sometimes his head goes under the water and he kicks out and pushes up and surfaces again, the lump of his beating heart in his throat, his ears thick with the river’s thundering roar. Once, he misjudges, forgets to tip his head as he goes and hits the tree mouth-first. He feels the pained grunt he makes, a burst of vibration in his ribs, but he cannot hear it over the sound of the river. His mouth fills with hot blood. Athelstan spits it out and it dribbles in sticky lines down his chin until the river washes it away.

“Your face.” Gyda’s teeth have ceased their clattering but her words come out slurred and sleepy instead.

Athelstan slips on a quick smile. “I still have all my teeth. We are almost there.”

She resettles her grip, wrapping one hand around the shorn base of a long-gone branch. One sleeve flutters in the gap between trunk and root, caught up in the cascading torrent that funnels between, the other is wrinkled up at her elbow. At the tense-and-release of her muscles the scars of long, puckered scratches flicker on her skin, washed bloodless but still beading up blood like jewels along their lengths.

“Hurry, Gyda.” Bjorn’s face is pale as Gyda’s and there is a tremor in his shoulders.

“I am.”

There is a thick sludge of deadwood gathering all along the edge of the bank beneath the ridge. As it piles up, the larger pieces catch in the rush and sweep through the gap, battering against the tree hard enough to gouge out shards of flesh.

Gyda tenses her shoulders. A branch spins out from the bank, thudding into the trunk just by her elbow. “Let go.” It passes away downstream and drives itself into the earth some way below. Now the water runs clear of debris. “Now. Quick!”

One small slip…

“Christe eleison,” Athelstan whispers, and his fingers release, like the jaws of a trap springing open. Gyda launches herself across the gap, grabbing at the rootball. For a moment, her small body bridges the space. The swirling tumble of water froths up at her back and builds angrily towards her shoulders, ready to crest. Then she lets go of the trunk and allows the current to take her, pushing her through the arc of her extended arm and into the rootball with a thud that knocks the breath from her. She climbs, gasping air back into her lungs, wedging feet between twisting and looping roots, reaching up behind her for Bjorn’s extended hand. Then she is gone, up and out of sight, and Athelstan is alone in the water.

***

Bjorn’s fire is a small, hopeful one.

Gyda huddles by it, hugging her knees to her chin. Through the sodden folds of her linen shift the outline of her ankle bones show as stark protuberances. “All the faerings are gone, aren’t they?” The chattering of her teeth counterpoints her words with hard, unintended punctuations. Her woollen overdress and single remaining shoe sit in a sad, seeping pile beside her on the gentle earthen slope, flooding the crumbly hump of an anthill with dirty river water.

Beside her, Athelstan sits and shudders. The sun shines down a brilliant midday light from a cloudless blue sky, but all its warmth has vanished. His body aches as from a winter chill, the kind that tightens muscles into burning knots and seeps down to linger in the bones long after flesh has warmed through. His clothes are plastered to him like a second skin - though a dirtier one than he has been used to since he was a small child, Sigeric never having approved of dirt in general - and his hair streams muddy rivulets down the neck of his tunic.

“They can hardly use the river now, anyway,” he says, more to himself than in answer to Gyda’s thought. The river is a monster. It has consumed its banks and now it writhes and spits against the new walls that contain it, with trees and boulders and the bobbing remains of a fox all tossed up and down in the violent swells like children’s toys in a washtub. And nothing seems familiar.

Across the fire, hunched in tense concentration over the first fragile flames, Bjorn mutters a half-hearted, “Shut up,” and Athelstan presses his lips together, silencing any further thought. Frodi nudges his head over Bjorn’s shoulder, drooping his eyebrows into a dejected expression, his nose wriggling at the smoke. Wincing, Bjorn shoves him back with an open palm. “Off, you big ox.” He leans sideways, rubbing his palm up and down a swathe of scraped skin that wraps around his neck from ear to clavicle. He did not escape unscathed from his headlong rush downriver either, then. And Frodi shuffles back at the rejection, his faltering paws tripping over the string of Bjorn’s bow and twanging it against the earth with a sad note.

The fire rises now, hot and fast, catching at drought-dry sticks with an eager flame. Gyda puts hands and feet out to the thawing warmth, wriggling her toes inside her sodden woollen socks, making a contented noise deep in her throat. Her movements are stiff and trembling, her fingers closer to blue now than white and though she tries, she cannot close her hands around her toes.

Bjorn’s throat bobs. His face, beneath the swipe of dirt over forehead and nose, is a stark white, showing off a light haze of freckles across his cheekbones that Athelstan has never noticed before. “I will do that,” he says, his voice gruff. He scoots round the fire close enough to shove Gyda’s hands away, pulling her foot up into his lap.

“You always press too hard,” she complains, resting herself back on one hand and allowing Bjorn to work, while endeavouring to keep the other up to the fire. “Ow. Ow!”

“Do you want feet or not?” Bjorn bows low over his work. The top of his head is all that is visible, his hair ingrained with dirt and bits of leaf.

The forest is quiet beneath the thundering of the river, but it is an unnatural silence, the expectant waiting of a collective in-drawn breath, and they fall into silence with it while the fire crackles and grows. The trees on the bank - or where the bank now is - still wave their branches in the wind that pushed the faering upriver. But it is a strange dance, for the wind, too, is muffled under the sound of the water, making it seem as if the trees contort themselves to a music only they can hear.

Athelstan leans close to the fire, chasing warmth, his rope belt creaking with the wracking shivers that squeeze his spine. The keys jangle on it, but the sheath is empty now, his knife somewhere in the river with Gyda’s left shoe and the no doubt broken wreck of the faering. He rubs at the knuckles of his hand, splaying his fingers out against the flames. His skin feels too tight around his bones, like a hide stretched on a frame. In fact, he feels strange altogether, a strangeness as when Ragnar got him drunk - full and heavy and dreamlike - or like those days on Ragnar’s ship, empty and disconnected from himself. He shivers and scratches at his neck, searching by custom for the folds of the cowl that is no longer there, and his fingers press into the cord of his cross instead. Tightening his hand about it, the leather presses into the fleshy pad of Athelstan’s thumb and the metal cross slips against his skin. For once, it is warmer than he is.

“How long will it take them to get to us,” Gyda asks after a long while, “if they cannot take the river?”

Bjorn’s hands slip into stillness. He shrugs, a little roll of his shoulders that is much too casual to be truth. “They cannot come right away. They will need to salvage what they can from the farm before it is too late.”

“Oh.” Gyda’s face drops. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

And of course, it must be true. Down at the settlement, where the river bends, the river will have spread out its wide and violent flood across the shallows, covering the shore, smashing the faerings against their wooden pilings, creeping up into the longhouses and the lower pens and trickling into Lagertha’s garden. Though with luck, the flax and barley fields - set so far back from the main arm of the river - will be safe enough. The settlement will bustle for the next few days with the moving of chests and barrels, the mending of rescued tools, the drying of clothing and food and any other salvageable items. And now all of yesterday’s panic seems even more absurd. Ragnar will have bigger concerns than one missing ewe and Bjorn’s wounded pride.

Gyda turns her hand over so that the back is facing the fire. The flesh is beginning to redden again, colour extending up from her palm to the middle joints of her fingers. “Which way home then?”

Bjorn shrugs again and kneads his palm into Gyda’s toes. “I have never been past the overhang before, not on land. We will have to find our way as we go.”

“Ow!” Gyda hisses again, jerking her foot in his hold. “We should go and get Sjurd.”

“What for?” Bjorn scoffs. “We only have to follow the river, and it cannot be more than a few days’ walk. And I am—”

Gyda flicks him in the ear, though her fingers are so stiff and clumsy the impact is not much. “If you say, ‘I am a man’ one more time I will fight you again.”

At that, a grin breaks out on Bjorn’s face and he tugs on Gyda’s bedraggled plait - two little yanks as if he is ringing a bell. “I was going to say something nice about you, but I won’t bother now.”

“What do _you_ think, Athelstan?” Gyda twists her head over her shoulder, tipping it sideways until - he assumes - she can see more than just the upside-down slope of his dripping hair.

Bjorn laughs and there is, as usual, an edge of scorn to it that Athelstan cannot pretend away. “What are you asking him for? He didn’t even want to go to Kattegat for worry we would get lost. Or eaten by a huldra.”

Across Athelstan’s blushing palm the scratches from the juniper’s rough skin make a net of livid white. Bjorn was right, about Kattegat. The owl was right. Athelstan’s fear has left them in a much worse position now. He swallows the urge to make an apology that will only cause an argument. He is useless here. His Latin will not protect them against wild beasts, his steady hand with a stylus will not help them find shelter. He pushes down another gutful of guilt. “Sjurd must be hours ahead of us by now. And he moves much faster. Surely, we would only chase him all the way to the lake if we try to follow.”

“But he must have noticed the flood. He will come looking for us. Won’t he?”

“We should have been on the river,” he jerks his shoulders in a shrug, “and dead. He has no reason to look at all.”

And how close they came to that being true. Gyda’s shoulders are still shaking, the fine, trembling shock of a songbird rescued from the jaws of a cat.

Bjorn clears his throat. “See? Even the idiot agrees with me. Once we are up on the ridge, we just have to go south. It cannot be any worse than the walk to Kattegat.”


	9. Chapter 9

The new riverbank soon softens into a natural terrace as they travel south, climbing up along the side of the hill in a promising line towards the ridge. To their left, the hillside forms a crumbling wall of earth and limestone, bone-dry and held together by nets of bramble, while the terrace itself is cluttered with pine trees of the short, fat kind, bunched in tight groups like chattering women at market. At first, these are small clusters, providing welcome patches of shade from a sun that seems to burn hotter as it begins its downward climb into the west, but they soon become large, crowded ranks, spanning the width of the terrace itself. Squeezing between the sharp needles and the rocky hillside brings Athelstan and the children each time to a new stand of trees, each much the same as the last, until their continued movement seems only a constant, tiring repeat of what has come before.

Athelstan measures their progress by landmarks on the opposite bank, across the bubbling brown surface of the river - a tall, lightning-split tree, an outcrop of granite, the smeared grey wound of an old landslide - and in the slow slipping of the scorching sun across the sky. The heat of it is beginning to catch in a reflective glare on the chunks of white limestone when Bjorn - ambling at the fore with Frodi - comes to a dead stop before the next stand of trees, chewing on his lower lip.

"We can't get through here," he says and demonstrates by shoving at a waist-height branch with both hands. Somewhere within the tree's wrapping of needles, wood grates against rock with the creaking groan of a tremulous building caught in a gale, and a handful of earth tumbles down, skittering against the toes of Bjorn's shoes.

"Maybe we can go around?" Gyda says, sounding more exhausted than hopeful. She wanders along the trees' meandering edge, brushing the branches with her fingertips so that they ripple behind her. On her feet, the strips of Bjorn's overtunic -wound around her drenched socks - leave damp footprints across the dusty ground, and the tied ends flap as she walks, giving every footstep a slight, unintended percussion. The trees run right to the edge of the terrace, their branches overhanging the sharp boundary by several feet, and Gyda hangs onto one, peering over the edge. Her hair droops in a heavy rope over her shoulder, wisps of dry, fluffy hazel at the centre parting darkening to soaked walnut at the tied end. "It goes straight down," she confirms, shaking her head. A fall of thirty or forty feet into that river, gauging by the opposite bank, is not worth the risk.

“We would never get Frodi round anyway.” Bjorn rubs at Frodi’s shaggy ear with one hand, shaking the branch again with the other. He sucks his lip into his mouth and releases it again with a thoughtful pop. “Through it is then.” He divests himself of his bow, leaning it against the hillside, then, with a heaving sigh that puffs his chest up, Bjorn releases his sax from its sheath with a quiet _snick_ of the leather fastening and climbs into the tree. The curtain of blue needles, spraying outwards from their little clusters at the end of each twig, close shut behind him.

Gyda makes to follow, gripping the handle of the utility knife on her belt, now cinched around the waist of her thin linen shift. She pushes at a branch, the wide limb filling her hand from the first knuckle to the heel, and stops, her face sagging into disappointment. She looks down again, at the little knife swallowed by her palm. "Useless," she mutters, flopping down onto a fat lower branch that sticks out like a bad tooth and kicking at her linen skirts. They have dried to a patchy brown in the hot sun, stiff with river-mud ingrained in the tightly woven threads. Heels out, tapping little dents into the ground, she scrunches the skirts in her hands. The linen crackles and fine dust drifts out. "I suppose I will just wait out here with Frodi," she says, nodding at the hound, who is stretched out on his side in the full heat of the sun. With his legs splayed as far as possible in front and behind, he is easily Ragnar's height from end to end.

“You can help him watch for wolves,” Athelstan says.

Gyda submits to the expectation and rolls her eyes. “Yes. You men forge a path with your bare hands, I will defend you from predators with my eating knife.” But she smiles now and shakes her head, her frustration calmed a little. “I can watch the time. And try to fix this mess.” She wiggles the handful of her skirts. “You can go see if Bjorn will let you help.”

“If not, I will keep you company. I am excellent at doing nothing.”

Inside, past the skin of needles, the branches are bare and wide-spaced but thick, making a spiral of up-down steps that tightens and thins as it climbs up the trunk. Bjorn has clambered through to the middle, where a gap between larger, older branches is filled with a spray of smaller offshoots that block the way through to the other side. A sharp twitch, then a stiffening of Bjorn’s shoulder suggests that he has heard Athelstan climb into the tree and knows very well who is behind him. He does not turn, only kicks his foot into the nook of branch and trunk and continues hacking at the limb in front of him. His sax bites down into the green wood with a _thunk_ , and shards of pine flesh and bark spray out from the wound, setting off a grating cough in the back of Bjorn’s throat. Wedged in by the weight of the wood, the blade sticks and Bjorn leans over it, the back of his neck raw red from effort and trailed with sticky pine resin, and grabs the handle with both hands, tugging it up and down until the blade releases again with a jerk. He falls backwards, elbows splayed, smacking bone on wood and - shaking off the pain - lines up the blade with the cut and brings it down again.

Athelstan squeezes through the maze of branches with, he suspects, much more effort than Bjorn required, and drops into the small space beside him. There is room, just, for him to press the top half of his body through the gap above the next larger limb and, taking the near-severed branch in both hands, to twist it around on the thread of flesh that connects it until it breaks with a satisfying snap. Athelstan tugs it out of the way, the summer-dry twigs shearing off in a hail of wood and dust, and thrusts it down through a gap towards the ground. His left wrist throbs and he shakes it, frowning, and grabs the next branch, pulling it down so that the root of it is exposed for Bjorn’s sax, like a neck for an execution.

They work like that for some time, Athelstan struggling to suck in the honey-thick air, acrid as smoke on the back of his tongue, wiping the scratching tree-grit out of his eyes, until Bjorn utters a sharp exhalation and drops backwards, thudding his shoulder-blades against the tree branch behind. He lifts his palms up to the pricks of light that pierce through into the dimness and his hands are shaking, his flesh swollen red and lined with bulging yellow blisters.

In these close quarters, Athelstan can smell the salt of Bjorn's sweat and each hot, puffing breath on his shoulder. He wipes his own sweat from his forehead with the back of a pine-sticky hand, grimacing at the pull of sap on his skin, and tugs at his tunic. Like Gyda's skirts, it is an irritation, the folds grown stiff and scratching, except between his shoulder-blades, where pooling sweat softens the linen again into a damp, uncomfortable warmth.

Bjorn stares at him, the sax drooping from his fingers in a way that Athelstan is sure would earn a reprimand from Ragnar if he were present. His blue eyes are large and intent with some deep thought and he opens his mouth as if to speak, but doesn’t.

“What is it?” Athelstan prompts, after some long moments. The air is thick in here and the cluttered branches wall his voice into the intimate space.

But Bjorn just shakes his head and turns away, his fingers tightening around the sax’s handle. One of the blisters bubbles up around the edge of the wood and he hisses.

Without thinking, Athelstan reaches out. “Let me take a turn.”

Bjorn startles, smacking Athelstan’s hand away and shoving himself backwards. In the small space, movement is not easy and he knocks head and arms and all on various branches in his near-panicked retreat, until he backs into the trunk of the tree, wedging the sax behind his back and out of Athelstan’s sight. As if he thinks Athelstan might take it by force.

The very thought is bewildering, and Athelstan knows his face is screwed up in an expression of utter confusion and disbelief. “Bjorn—”

“I am not giving my weapon to a _slave_ ,” Bjorn spits out. His voice is strained, and he flicks his eyes back towards their entry point, where Gyda’s back is simply a selection of lighter brown dotted between the pine clusters. Even in the quiet, her humming is a far-off sound, like the distant cry of a bird. And Bjorn’s gaze traces an urgent line from her to Athelstan and back - gauging distance, obstacles, speed - and he stiffens, every muscle slipping into taut preparedness.

After everything, Bjorn believes Athelstan would hurt them, as if Athelstan is the enemy here, as if Athelstan is the one who has murdered and stolen. He cannot move without going towards Bjorn, so he straightens backwards, squeezing the sting of Bjorn's slap from his fingers. "I know the law." His voice emerges in a similar strain to Bjorn's, with the tautness of anger suppressed into shivering, hushed words.

“You know nothing,” Bjorn spits, and he begins to shake too, clawing his fingers into the bark of a branch by his head. “Not your position or mine, or you would never ask me such a thing. I would be a fool to give this to you now. And Father did not teach me to be a fool.”

No, he taught you to hate and attack and destroy. He taught you cruelty and selfishness. The words burn on the tip of Athelstan’s tongue. He wants to say them. He wants to punch out his rage in his words. He wants to shame Bjorn into an acceptance of him. He wants to spit in Ragnar’s face, but Ragnar isn’t here. Here in the bitter-scented shadow, his ragged breathing matches Bjorn’s. And Bjorn may be a man by law, but he is young and afraid and still feeling his way in the world. And Athelstan came to turn it all upside down.

Athelstan's chest fills with a dark cloud of shame and his shoulders droop from their defensive hunch. Leaning his head against the branch behind him, twigs rasping against his back, he sighs. "I am well aware of my position." How could he not know it? His life is full of the constant reminder that he is just a mildly useful tool, and that he will be tolerated only until he has outlived his usefulness.

Bjorn sighs too, sitting down in the crook of the branch where his feet were earlier. His face loosens into a world-weary expression. “Then why do you do such stupid things?”

“What do you mean?” The sickness, the ewe, the short-lived escape attempt… Bjorn doesn’t know about any of those.

Once again, Athelstan finds himself the subject of unflinching study.

“Why—” Bjorn starts, but he is interrupted by the frantic rustling of branches.

Gyda pops her head through the opening of the tree, the pine clusters decorating her head like a wedding garland. “Could you give me something to do? Frodi’s dreaming about chasing things and I’m getting bored.”

In an instant, the intensity drops from Bjorn’s face, as sure as it was never there at all. He shrugs a shoulder, smooth and fluid, with no trace of the tension of moments before, and offers out the sax. “Your turn.”

***

In the late afternoon, the terrace breaks out at last from the cover of trees into a long stretch of bare, rock-covered ground. It narrows as it ascends, cutting a path between the inaccessible slope above and the sea of treetops that now skirts the cliff edge to their right. When Athelstan peers over it, the sheer wall of forest drops down below them for a hundred dizzying feet before hitting the brown rope of the river deep in the bottom of the valley. It is far out of hearing now, any remaining murmur indistinguishable from the rustling of the hot wind that ruffles the pine trees. Athelstan stumbles back from the edge, his head spinning.

“Don’t look down,” Gyda laughs, prodding him in the back. “Do you not have hills in England?”

Athelstan squints at the ground. The sun is past the three-quarter mark and closing in on the tops of the far mountains, but the rocks still shine out with a white glow, pure as the best candles. “Our hills are a good deal smaller. We have a few mountains, but I have never had cause to climb them.” Or to linger quite so near the edge. The thought makes him dizzy again and he takes several more steps backwards.

“There is the ridge, though.” Gyda points up past the tree line, to where a broad back of grey and purple swells. “How long do you think, Bjorn?”

Bjorn shields his eyes against the waning sun. “By dusk at the worst. We should find somewhere to camp below the ridge and top it tomorrow.”

Gyda nods agreement, though Bjorn hasn’t asked for it. She peels a thick strand of sweat-damp hair from her face and tucks it behind her ear. “I’m thirsty.”

Between them, they finish the few sips left in Bjorn’s leather bottle, pouring out the last small portion into a rock hollow for Frodi. It is not nearly enough. And when they start off again along the open ground, the empty bottle bounces between Bjorn’s belt and the bow in a steady, teasing thump. Athelstan swallows down the little saliva that sits in his mouth, his tongue sticky with dryness. Heat rises in waves from the ground, shivering in the air like a fog, and the rocks that rise up out of the earth are hot enough to cook on, burning through the soles of Athelstan’s shoes if he stops for too long. Gyda and Frodi pick their steps with deliberation and time begins to drag again. He rakes his hair - limp and dripping now - out of his eyes. It seems impossible that only hours ago he thought he would never be warm again.

Ahead, the path thins, jerks to the right around a spur of white rock, and slips out of sight behind it. Bjorn scratches at the short strands of hair on top of his head until they stand up on end away from his forehead, like the spines of a doused hedgehog. “With luck, it will be better when we get around that,” he says. Though from the scrunched indecision on his face, he is less convinced even than he sounds. There is no room to walk abreast here and Bjorn goes in front, waving Athelstan behind him and Gyda - last of all except for Frodi - slips close in at Athelstan’s back, taking a firm hold of his rope belt. Her feet crunch down on loose stones, sending a handful skittering off the edge of the path and into the trees.

“Do you hear water?” she asks. Beneath her words comes the soft pattering of the falling stones finally hitting something.

Athelstan’s tongue scratches in his mouth - a big, rough pinecone. He leans closer to the rock.

“Up ahead,” Bjorn says, stepping out along the edge of the spur. He feels his way along the wall, his shoulder pressed up tight to it, his bow dangling out over empty space. And there is, beneath the scraping of their footsteps, a quiet tinkling sound coming from nearby.

The thought of both shade and water only makes Athelstan’s thirst worse. ‘Abstinence is a gift from God,’ Sigeric would say. And accustomed as Athelstan is to going without, it is with difficulty that he squashes down the whelming urge to hurry along a path that is now only a few handspans wide in his desperation for something to ease the cracking dryness of his throat. He swallows and swallows again, his tongue scratching at the roof of his mouth. The sensation is unbearable.

Then there is a heart-stopping, groaning crack and the ground shudders. Athelstan freezes in place. Gyda’s hand tightens on his belt and the rope pulls taut, digging into the bruise on his stomach.

Bjorn says, “I think—” and the ground drops out beneath him. He has time only to utter the beginning of a sharp cry and then he is falling, sliding with the tumble of rocks, his arms flung up in a desperate, grasping panic.

Athelstan dives forward, yanking Gyda with him, and grabs for Bjorn with both hands, catching a handful of his tunic at his shoulder just before he drops out of sight. Bjorn is heavy, impossibly heavy, and Athelstan doesn’t have a hope of stalling him in mid-fall. All of that sudden extra weight wrenches him flat to the ground so quickly that he doesn’t feel it happen. His face smashes into the stones with an impact that snaps his head back up again afterwards, stinging, blood pouring into his eyes. And the tunic wisps between the fingers of his outstretched hand, like a moth fluttering over his skin, and then is gone.

Time stops. Athelstan’s breath echoes in his head. Blood trickles down his face and onto the path, splashing up dust with dark red drops. How has he allowed this to happen? How will he get Gyda home alone? How will he tell Lagertha that he has killed her son? He feels a new, cold and crushing weight settle down upon his chest, a sure conviction that he is better off diving back into the raging river to drown than delivering only one child safely home.

Then, in the next moment, he feels Bjorn’s arm sliding down his and catches at it. Bjorn stops falling with a jolt. Fire blooms in Athelstan’s wrist, bursting upward through his shoulder. He grits his teeth, pressing his forehead into the ground, dragging Bjorn’s twisting, writhing weight up, inch by painful inch, until Bjorn throws an arm up onto the path and helps to haul himself up the final part of the way.

They all collapse beside each other against the rocky slope, a complicated knot of grasping hands. Bjorn presses himself against Athelstan's shoulder, coughing up white dust, the frenzied drumming of his heart shaking his tunic and rumbling through the bones of Athelstan's arm. Bjorn's nose is bleeding and he wipes his face with his sleeve, stares at the glob of black for a moment, then wipes his sleeve on his trousers.

Absurdly, Athelstan thinks of his washing, of how much he and Gyda will already have to do and what is Bjorn supposing he will wear in the meantime and— And then he catches himself and laughs, a series of small, puffed breaths that are much more relief and panic and shock than genuine humour.

After a while, Bjorn shifts - a short, purposeful movement of his shoulder, nudging Athelstan sideways into Gyda. “I dropped my bow,” he says.

Athelstan nods. Gyda, her arm stretched across Athelstan’s chest, squeezes Bjorn’s elbow.

Bjorn says, “I broke my arrows anyway.” Then, “We will have to go back.”

A huge chunk of the path ahead is missing now, the treetops beside it bent and broken by the weight of the assault. They were so near, and now every hard-won step must be undone.

Gyda puts an arm around Frodi's neck and hugs his fluffy head to hers, her little face disappearing into his wiry coat. "Just so you know, Bjorn," she mumbles, her words muffled by the dusty fur, "I am never getting in a boat with you again."


	10. Chapter 10

Gyda drops down beside Athelstan and plops her bare feet into the shallow stream. A rictus of instant regret creases her face, ending with a nasal hiss and she slaps the heel of her hand against the mossy bank. For a moment, a floral scent dapples the air. “I knew you were just washing,” she says at last, her voice as stiff as her body is, kicking her toes up into the dawn light that is just beginning to smudge gold on the water. “Bjorn was sure you ran away but he is an idiot.” Braver again, she digs her feet back down into the freezing water, plunging her toes into the silty bottom and stirring it up. It swirls in muddy eddies.

Athelstan tugs his sleeve back down over the curve of his thumb and cups a hand in the dirty whirlpool. “I am trying to,” he teases, tilting his fingers and making a show of slopping the silt back into the stream. In response, Gyda grins, leans back and kicks the water up in a sparkling wave. Athelstan sits back, not fast enough, and the shower of droplets hits him full in the face, cold and sharp as a sudden hailstorm. He flicks his head and wipes a hand over his dripping cheeks.

“The snares are empty,” Gyda tells him, while he is scratching uneven fingernails through the itchy stubble on one side of his chin. “He will be in a bad mood all day now.” She sighs and leans her chin on her hand, pressing her face into a more child-like roundness, fingertips pointing out a constellation of freckles across a submerged cheekbone.

When is he not? Athelstan ducks down again and washes the back of his neck. His fingers stutter-slip across the scar’s smooth round. The grime of yesterday’s travel and last night’s sleeplessness drips back into the stream, leaving a tacky, sap-stained border glued to his hairline. One… two… three pine-dotted plateaus down the hillside a woodpecker takes up his morning chores of a sudden with a sharp _rat-a-tat-tat_ that makes Gyda jump. Below that, the brown stain of the river crashes against a newly ploughed bank of mud and detritus. They are some way north of where they washed up yesterday. Past that, they have not been able to guess exactly where.

“Ugh, I hate pine trees.”

Athelstan makes an affirming noise in his throat.

“Can you help me, Athelstan?” Gyda tugs at a matted lump of hair at the back of her head, prying out pine needles and a long strand of sticky resin.

“I do not know how much help I can be. This did not go so well last time.”

“It’s already in knots this time. Just do what you did before, but ba—” she yawns, a jaw-cracking gape that makes her eyes water, “backwards.”

He gives in with a shrug and she turns her back to him, hugging her knees up to her chin.

“I fear you will remain somewhat of a tree monster,” Athelstan says, wetting her hair and attempting to tug the strands apart with his fingers, since we have no comb.”

Gyda laughs. It is quiet, but her ribs shake like an earthquake. “We do not have tree monsters.” She is silent for a short while and in the trees above the dawn chorus turns raucous. “Wait,” Gyda shoots up straight, and Athelstan jerks his head back, avoiding a bloodied nose by a narrow margin. “Wait, do you have tree monsters in England? What are they like? Are they dangerous?”

It is Athelstan’s turn to laugh. “No, there are no monsters in England, only stories of them. There is nothing more dangerous there than bear or wolf or wild pig.” And man. Man has always been the most monstrous of God’s creation.

“You miss England often,” Gyda observes in a hushed voice, breaking through Athelstan’s sudden, sombre silence.

How he misses it. He misses the cry of gulls and the break of the ocean, he misses the echo of harmonious voices in the chapel, he misses the feel of gritty, yellow earth between his fingers during the September ploughing and the taste of spiced wine on the days when the ground crackles with frost. All these things that he might never hear or see or touch again. Although there are things he has grown to like here too. He likes the soft rushing of the river and the noisy chatter of songbirds in the trees, he likes the laughter of children playing in the yard on warm evenings until the sun slips too low and they stumble to bed, dirty and droopy-eyed. He likes working by the fire with Gyda, learning her runes and laughing, _laughing_ without being struck. And perhaps one day all of that will be enough, and he will no longer feel the hollowness of loss at the thought of home.

Gyda knocks her shoulder back into Athelstan’s arm, nudging him back to reality. He blinks away the mist of tears and swallows the aching lump in his throat.

“I am not glad Father stole you. But I am glad you came, to be my friend.” She curls in on herself again, pressing her face into her knees.

Athelstan makes a loose plait of her hair. Little Gyda, shy and sensitive and always on the edge of things, never quite matching up to what her world expects her to be. Perhaps he rescued her as much as she rescued him. “I am glad to be your friend too, Gyda.” He works the leather thong around the end of her hair and ties it up. Pulling it tight sends a spiral of burning pain round his left wrist and he hisses.

“What is it?” Gyda looks over her shoulder and Athelstan catches himself, sucking the sound back in and tickles her neck with the end of her bunched hair, distracting her. He chases her with it until she falls over sideways, giggling, into a soft pile of pine needles at the base of a tree.

“I am afraid that is the best I can do.”

Gyda reaches up and stuffs a huge handful of needles down the neck of his tunic. “It is nice to have someone to be a tree monster with.”

***

At mid-morning, after several hours of hard walking, they scramble to the top of what they hope to be the final plateau leading to the ridge. Instead, as Athelstan pulls himself to his feet at the top of the slope and dusts the palms of his hands against each other, he is confronted with a cliff. It rises fifty feet or so, smooth as a tumbled stone except for a messy fringe of purple heather, stretching north and south as far as sight reaches through the scattered pines.

Athelstan’s heart drops with a physical bump. He takes in a breath of hot, bitter air and it burns. “’Anōikodómēsen kat’ emoû, kaì ouk exeleúsomai.’” Except that God has fenced them out, not in. The cliff is a fortress wall, blocking them from their only route south.

Bjorn elbows him aside. “Can’t you speak properly?” He glares at the cliff as if he might move it through pure irritation and when it refuses to disappear he spits out an obscenity that raises Athelstan’s eyebrows.

“Do not let Mother hear you use that one.” Gyda swats clinging pine needles from her skirts.

“Father says it.”

“Father gets sent out to the pigs when he does.”

Bjorn grunts in reply. Still contemplating the cliff, he steps forward with a lazy, faltering stride, kicking up clumps of loose earth at each step, hands uplifted at his sides in helpless supplication, as if he is asking the Earth, ‘Why did you put this here?’.

For Athelstan, it is an unexpected reminder of Father Cuthbert’s tedious recitals during the Night Office on Holy Days - his shrivelled hands held up at either side of the lectern, where the shivering candlelight exaggerated the tremors in his fingers- and Athelstan’s impious impatience at the over-careful enunciation of every simple phrase. He feels a pang of something at the memory - something that isn’t quite homesickness, more a strange mixture of relief and regret, neither of which he has time now to examine. He presses it down.

Gyda is squinting up at the visible edge of the ridge. The sky above it is a perfect blue, dotted with wispy, unthreatening clouds. “Can you see a way up?” she asks, lifting herself up on tiptoes as if that will somehow help.

“Can you change into a bat, Loki?” Bjorn snaps. But he steps forward right up to the cliff and begins to run his hands over the rock, feeling out the protrusions on its face with a thoughtful furrow to his brow. Presently, he hoists himself up on fingertips, hangs for a moment and drops back down again, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He squats down and scrubs his hands in the dirt until the skin of his palms is ingrained with a layer of black dust, then climbs back up and starts feeling a way up the cliff face.

“Should you…?” But Athelstan can see already that it is impossible, if not for Bjorn, then for Gyda - who has already been struggling along in clothes not best suited to tramping through a forest, despite her lack of complaint. And Bjorn would certainly never leave Frodi behind unless it was a matter of life and death. So he quiets the rest of his thoughts, encouraged by Bjorn’s brief glare over his shoulder, and slumps down on a nearby boulder, leaning forward to rest his throbbing wrist across his knee.

The forest is easier here. These pines - cast in thin patches along the plateau - are the taller kind, straight as a plumb line and top-heavy with branches. In the canopy, birds twitter, undisturbed by Bjorn’s feet thudding back to earth at each failed ascent. The sun slips through them in golden shafts, lighting patches of the slopes below in hues of orange and yellow, while the ground beneath the cliff remains a shadowed umber, overlaid with pine needles and the occasional coiling emerald of ivy.

Gyda drops down beside him, props one foot up on her opposite knee and begins plucking pine needles out of the bottom of her foot-bindings. “It must be nice to be able to eat just _anything_ ,” she says, nodding towards Frodi, who has dragged out a piece of sun-blackened carcass from somewhere. He is gnawing at it with great diligence, his yellow back teeth grinding across the stone-hard flesh, a delighted snuffling emanating from his nose.

Athelstan grimaces. “I do not think we are so desperate as that.” Though his stomach has been twisting round on itself from hunger since last night and the pain stabs in again now, deep into his side. It seems an age since the small breakfast Gyda forced on him two days ago and the pangs should be fading by now, settling down into the faint, unremarkable sickness that Athelstan is well-accustomed to. But he has got out of the habit of hunger recently.

Gyda kneads at her own rumbling stomach with the heel of her hand. “Not yet.”

“Well, you can eat it, if you can get it from him. I think I will wait until we get back.” But there is a kernel of doubt in his mind now. What if there is no way up onto the ridge? It will be months of walking, Sjurd said, to travel the long way round past the lake, and that for a grown man with proper supplies and a knowledge of the way. And with the rains coming soon, then the snows… Across the river valley, the sun plays fire and shadow across the ominous face of the western ridge. They are all clad in linens and summer wool, and Gyda without even her shoes, and Athelstan knows how truly short a time they would survive once bad weather comes.

Bjorn’s grip slips. Athelstan winces, watching him slither in a barely controlled fall six feet down the rock face and tumble to a thudding stop at the bottom. He lets out a great, involuntary _oof_ on impact and lies still in the pine needles, wheezing breath back into his lungs.

Gyda tilts her head at Athelstan. “We should have gone to find Sjurd.” It isn’t quite an ‘I told you so’ - there is no particular pointedness in expression or tone - only a subdued tiredness in the curve of her shoulders.

Athelstan follows her gaze north. Although he knows it is impossible, he finds himself squinting through the distant trees, hoping for a glimpse of a bouncing leather pack and the _crunch PAD_ noise of Sjurd’s approaching footfalls. But all that moves is a squirrel, chestnut red, spiralling up the trunk of a tree and disappearing with a crash into the uppermost branches.

“It was… your pet… fool who decided… against that,” Bjorn says, between heaving breaths.

“He was agreeing with you at the time, Earl Idiot.”

Athelstan tenses, expecting another argument of the kind that ended with him being shoved down a bank, but Bjorn only snorts a laugh and rolls back to his feet. He scrubs the back of his head and a shower of debris patters back onto the ground. “Well, we could go south, but if there is no way up we will just hit the overhang and have to turn back again anyway. And I think the cliff more likely to drop at the end than at the side, so… north?”

“North,” Gyda agrees, with a firm nod.

***

The remainder of the day drags on with a tedious slowness, with the unchanging, unending face of the cliff at their right hand, while the boiling sun slips inch by inch across the arc of the sky. And when at last it falls into a late summer dusk, it falls on their reluctant camp, huddled in the shadow of the unattainable ridge.

“I think tomorrow,” Bjorn says, stabbing a sharpened stick with unnecessary force into the soft ground by the fire. The carcass of a single squirrel, skewered on the forked end, lies prostrate in the smoky heat above the cooking embers. It is, even when added to the pile of foraged leaves piled by Athelstan’s crossed legs, a meagre meal after a full day of walking. And Bjorn’s confident proclamation is less convincing with the looming rock at their backs, now little more than an endless blackness in every direction. From the tightness in Bjorn’s jaw, he knows it. He looks at Gyda, fallen asleep against the cliff halfway through pulling her socks off, and the muscle jumps at the juncture of his jaw and neck, his back teeth grinding across each other with a sudden screech, making Athelstan wince. Bjorn shrugs, turning the squirrel over, and they both sit and watch the skin bubble and brown, a sharp silence growing between them, full of the treacherous shards of previous arguments, of all the words that cannot be unsaid.

Back the way they have come, the cliff wall and the army of trees stand tall and silent in the lowering dusk, and in his mind’s eye Athelstan draws the continuing line of the river behind them, deep in the valley and beneath the overhang. He paints its sinuous curve around the feet of the last great hills and its sweeping arc past the shore where Ragnar’s longhouse sits in its little patch of oak woods. And the distance between here and there stretches on and on. It is a long, long way now. In the pit of his stomach an itching desperation bursts into bloom. If they cannot find a way south… Athelstan palms his cross, tugging down on the leather thong until it digs into the back of his neck. If they cannot find a way south, this little piece of metal will not save them. But still his hand lingers on it, unable quite to let go.

“You have seen a flood like that before,” Bjorn says of a sudden, his voice wavering in the tight space between question and demand. His glance is full of an unfamiliar awkwardness, a flitting flash of blue from beneath hooded eyes, but it is difficult to read his face in the fluttering shadows.

Shaking his head with a slowness born of caution, Athelstan answers, “I have only heard of it.” Bjorn accepts that with a short tilt of his head and turns back to the fire. But for once, Bjorn’s remark does not seem like the precipice of an argument and Athelstan is reluctant to let the opportunity pass, so he adds, “It is what killed my family,” and waits, fighting a building tension in his shoulders, for the biting comment that is almost certain to follow.

Bjorn frowns and readjusts the stick a hair’s-breadth to the left. He leaves his hand there, fingers resting on the nodes of the stripped stem. “You told Gyda they died of fever.”

“After the floodwaters receded, they thought it safe. They did not know there were carcasses upriver, that the water had fouled the well and the crops and the air. They were not the only ones to die.” Athelstan picks a gangly-legged spider from a dandelion stem and tosses it away. Frodi sits up at the movement, his ears half-raised like wings, and watches it scuttle out of sight with a hard stare. “At least, that is how Eldwyn explained it to me. But I was young, perhaps I misunderstood. Or have misremembered,” he allows with a small shrug.

Bjorn considers that for a while, tapping his fingers on the stick. “How old were you?”

“I was nearing my ninth winter.” Their faces have faded over the years, but Athelstan still remembers with stark clarity the musty smell in the cellar where he hid himself after Sigeric told him the news, far into the corner behind Godric’s barrels of sacramental wine. He remembers the chill of the dirt floor beneath his bare feet, the shape of the sheet webs across the side of the broken bottom stair. He still has the scar from the priory cat, who found him too close to her sightless new kittens and ousted him with indignation.

Bjorn turns and stares at him, brows drawn down in concentration, as if Athelstan is a mystery he cannot untangle. Plainly, he has never considered that Athelstan did not spring into being as he is now - a fully formed irritation. Then he sniffs and a slow, unexpected smile spreads across his face, crinkling at the corners of his mouth. “You must have been a scrawny little thing.”

There is some tiny softening there in the sharp edges Bjorn keeps just for him and Athelstan relaxes in response. He laughs, shoulders slipping down into looseness. “I was, yes. Eldwyn used to say I could rub my arms together to start a fire.”

“You still could. Though you wouldn’t burn for long.” Bjorn’s eyes burn dark with some shifting emotion, but he does not question further.

This time, Athelstan lets the moment pass and looks back down at his work, shooing a woodlouse away from his greenery. The quiet slips back in behind the snapping of the fire and the scraping of Bjorn’s shoe against the ground as he sketches rough patterns in the dust with his heel. It is almost companionable now, but there is still a sharpness to it, a danger Athelstan does not dare to risk twice.

Out in the dark beyond the firelight, bats emerge from their roost, drawing swift patterns of broken black lines across the starry sky, and far away to the north a fox screams for their mate, but no response comes. Athelstan rests his left wrist across his knee, breathing through the long waves of aching pain. The forest is alive with the noise of night creatures, yet it feels desolate and the ache of his wrist is small compared to the aching fear in Athelstan’s chest when he stops to examine the many mistakes of the past few days.

Do Ragnar and Lagertha fear for their children now? Did they work today with one eye on the distant woods? Did they make sacrifice when the sky turned black upon an empty shore? Do they regret entrusting them to Athelstan?

He should have refused. But under Ragnar’s scrutinising gaze, with Ragnar’s hand in its habitual place clasped around the back of Athelstan’s neck - claiming and possessive, slightly sticky from spilt ale - how could he?

“I wish you to take care of the children while we are gone,” Ragnar said, as if he had not already announced it earlier, as if Bjorn was not already giving Athelstan glares of promised retribution for being placed in charge of him. “To keep them safe and tend the farm. Will you swear an oath on this, Priest?”

And Ragnar leaned even closer then, so close that his stale breath puffed across Athelstan’s cheek, the blue of his eyes as endless and consuming as the sky. And Athelstan had no choice but to swear it, to promise on the penalty of his soul to this man who owned every inch of his bones. It was an anchor he did not want, though in some ways he was glad of the trust, to be given responsibility. It was, after all, another step away from fetters, from the burn of the rope around his neck, from being treated like a thing. It was hope.

But look how little his oath has turned out to be worth.

“God, why am I here?” he whispers, the words barely more than a breath, hidden beneath the spitting of the meat and smothered by the darkness. His English sounds absurdly out of place here in the attentive hush of the Northmen’s forest, the words feel wrong falling from his tongue. He is making everything worse. What is the purpose of it? “Why have you brought me here?” It isn’t the first time he has asked this question, speaking out into the deep darkness of the night. And not for the first time, the darkness does not answer him.


	11. Chapter 11

“We should have gone to Kattegat.” Bjorn kicks a foothold into the side of the fallen oak - rotten wood flaking away from the trunk in shards the size and shape of crude spearheads - and hoists himself up as if mounting a horse. It must have been an ancient tree before it came down, wider than Bjorn is tall and soft with moss. The air around it is busy with droning wasps. “ _I_ wanted to go. The _Gods_ wanted us to go. But _you_ defied them. And now see what has happened.” Bjorn scowls down over his shoulder -his neck wrinkling into little folds beneath his jaw -focusing all his anger at the top of Athelstan’s head.

Standing in the lee of the oak’s skeleton, up to his waist in a forest of scrawny saplings, Athelstan pretends away the burning intensity of Bjorn’s gaze and looks away through the cage of the oak’s branches and into the bowl of the valley below. Rounding the end of the cliff early that morning brought them back southwards along the eastern side of the ridge, where the orderly pines have given way to the dappled shade of spreading oaks and the forest floor is overspread with the vibrant green of musky wood anemone. Right now, Frodi is trotting around in it, crushing the delicate leaves under indelicate paws, finding the perfect place to mark his possession of this corner of the world.

“Athelstan does not believe in our Gods.” Gyda holds her skirts up in bunches at her knobbly knees, winding her way through the saplings, her leather-bound feet crunching an acorn that sprouts a single leaf. “I don’t think they care if he obeys them or not.”

“He brought us bad luck.”

At that, Gyda stops and tilts her head to one side, showing off a great smudge of dirt all along her otherwise pale chin. “The saving our lives kind?”

From atop the great oak trunk now, one foot dangling by Athelstan’s ear, Bjorn’s scowl twists even further, until he resembles the grotesque faces carved on the hidden corners of stone churches. Gone is any semblance of last night’s cautious understanding and Bjorn’s hatred is more painful now than it was before, piercing through Athelstan’s hope-weakened defences. Athelstan crosses his arms tight over his chest, fighting the urge to press at his heart.

Gyda hops up onto the side of the oak trunk. The matted twist of her hair, now stuck with twigs from another night sleeping on the ground, catches unnoticed on a piece of uplifted bark as she clambers up, leaving behind several long strands that glint amber in the sunlight. At the top, she drops her legs over the far side of the oak and sits there, admiring the view from beside Bjorn. Together within the oak’s deadwood nest, the children look like a pair of baby birds, peering out at the world.

“You don’t recognise anything yet?” she asks, pressing her shoulder into the back of Bjorn’s.

“Wouldn’t I have said so, if I did?” Bjorn scrubs a hand up and down the back of his neck with a frustrated intensity, scratching red lines into his skin.

Gyda narrows her eyes at his back, her cheek flushing an angry red line along the bone. “We’re all tired and aching, you know. Don’t—” She stops herself with an effort that shakes her shoulders, balling her hands into fists against the oak’s rugged skin. “Just don’t,” she bites out, in Lagertha’s severest tone.

Athelstan does ache. The pain wove an intricate web during the night and when he awoke, long before dawn, every muscle was rigid with the particular pain of deep swelling, the kind that throbs up green and purple a few days after he has earned a penance. He leans sideways against the oak and slips a hand beneath the neck of his tunic to knead at the meat of his shoulder. His fingers search by habit for the marks from Sigeric’s wooden rod, the fat lines of swollen flesh, sometimes of ripped and broken skin, that catch on his callouses. But of course, there are none. There has been no penance from Sigeric, no beating from Ragnar, only his bruising in the river, tumbled smooth like a pebble.

“Anyway, I think I would rather be lost on this side of the river than the other.” Gyda brushes an inquisitive wasp from her shoulder. It flits around her head, illuminated in gold. “At least the sea will stop us if we go too far.”

“Except if we are too far north. Then we will end up in Svithjód.”

Gyda shrugs a shoulder. “Perhaps a journey to Uppsala would please the Gods?”

“I wish it would please the Gods to get us home quickly.” Bjorn forms a fist, tapping it on his upraised knee. “We should be there, helping. If we had gone to Kattegat—”

“—we would have been eaten by Sjurd’s wolf on the way.”

“No chance of that, I would have fed the slave to her as a distraction.” Bjorn kicks the toe of his shoe into Athelstan’s ear and Athelstan stumbles sideways with a breathless grunt, clutching at his head. His ear rings, loud then quiet, like the tolling of a bell. For a moment he is utterly disoriented, as if jolted from a deep sleep. He’s late to the chapel. What hour are they ringing?

“Stop it, Bjorn!”

“Why?”

Even through the noise in his head, Athelstan can hear the full measure of scorn in that one word, wrapped as a protection around a trembling fear. “The only thing he is good for out here is bait. Unless we kill him and eat him ourselves.”

“Shut up.” Gyda snaps. And she shoves Bjorn off the far side of the oak.

A tumbling commotion follows, accompanied by a plethora of foul-mouthed exclamations, and a few moments later Gyda disappears with a sudden jerk, uttering a half-shriek as she goes. By the time Athelstan drops down on the other side, Bjorn is shouting for Frodi through the cage of branches, dusting muck from his clothing with intermittent swipes of his hand, and Gyda is kicking at a rotten pile of winter leaves - brown and orange and gold - that have gathered along the base of the fallen trunk, her mouth curved downward in an unhappy line.

She looks up at his stumbling impact. “Wait,” she says, raising a palm at him while he is still catching his balance. “Now _you_ are the tree monster.” She goes up on tiptoes, reaching out, and he ducks his head, though neither is needful. Gyda tugs a piece of bark out of the hair that curls over his forehead. “There.” Her feet thump back down in the leaves and she pats at his errant curls, smoothing them down. He knows they pop right back up again because she frowns hard at his hairline, eyes narrowed at the disobedience. “I can cut it for you when we get home if you would like? Not that silly one you had before with the…” she draws a circle with her finger, “…just tidier.”

Athelstan’s heart clenches, but he knew already that Ragnar would never let him keep his tonsure. Quite apart from the look of it, it marks him out as belonging to someone else, to a God that Ragnar considers too weak to worship.

Evidently, he doesn’t keep the stricken look from his face as well as he thinks, because Gyda winces hard at her own words, shoulders coming up in a protective shrug. “I mean, it will be winter soon. You would get too cold anyway with a hole on your head.”

“Maybe Father will remove the whole _of_ your head and be done with it,” Bjorn snaps. “ _Come_ , Frodi!”

Athelstan’s head buzzes. The world turns grey.

There is blood on the ground, a sticky river running from Eldwyn’s body. It bubbles out of his neck like a mountain spring, trickling across the ground a pure, sunset red. It is warm and wet on Athelstan’s toes and he stumbles back in horror, bumps something, trips and falls. Please, God, there is so much blood! He cannot breathe. He presses his book to his chest, gasping against the weight of it.

Ragnar shakes him hard, his fingers digging into the muscle of Athelstan’s shoulder, long and sharp as a raven’s talons. _So much blood._

By the haycart, Floki has found Eldwyn’s spade and he plants it in the ground by the blade. It takes several tries - the dirt is dry as old bones - but when it is done, the iron half-sunk and the handle slanting up through the air at a slight angle, he crowns it with Eldwyn’s head. The flesh of Eldwyn’s neck squelches down around the wood, the skin wrinkling up a little at the edges -as Floki forces the head down - like a loose sock around the stark white spine. Floki starts giggling, a high-pitched hysterical noise, and wiggles the head a few more times, holding onto Eldwyn’s ears with his long, spidery fingers, as if they are the handles of a large ale mug. Athelstan gulps down one mouthful of vomit and then another. Above them, the crows are gathering. They form a cloud in the sky, impenetrably black, spreading a shadow like a death shroud that ripples over the bloody ground. Theirs is a thunderous shouting.

“Athelstan. Athelstan!”

But no - he shakes his head - the crows came later. He takes a deep, waking breath and the black edges of the world recede a little. Gyda is at his shoulder, her face lined with worry, both of her hands clutched in the meat of his upper arm, her fingers disappearing into the wrinkles of his tunic sleeve. He hears ravens, the throaty _cruck-cruck_ of their distress and the crashing of wings. Gyda shoves at him with both hands and he goes with it, unresisting, collapsing back from his knees into a seated sprawl. His trousers are slimy with mulching leaves and one knee is bloody. He reaches out a shaking hand to brush away the dirt and misses completely. Gyda, kneeling in the mess of stinking wet leaves, pushes his hands aside and does it for him.

Athelstan shakes his head again and stutters out, “I am sorry.” His teeth are chattering, and he is still struggling a little for breath and it sounds wrong, although he cannot think why.

She frowns at him, the beginning of a deeper concern forming in her blue eyes. “Athelstan… what language is that?”

He stares at her, blank. His words are a confusion, there are too many of them. He plucks some from the swirling mess and tries again but this time they catch in his throat, choking him, half-released. There was so much blood, and he is responsible for so much more. He might be responsible for the children’s, too, before the end.

Gyda’s hand clenches on his knee. She searches his face with a flickering gaze and whatever she sees there, her expression darkens as a bright day overcome by a sudden storm. Before Athelstan can even think to prevent it, she springs to her feet and spins towards Bjorn, levelling him with a look of absolute fury. In the face of it, Bjorn takes a hasty step back into the oak’s branches, half-tripping over Frodi as the hound slips out of the tree behind him, covered in twigs and trailing a long bramble from his coat. Bjorn’s gaze flits about with the nervous, changeable fluttering of a butterfly, not quite settling on anything. He did not really mean it, perhaps he never has, except in the way that frustrated youth always does - in the moment, without thought of consequence, kicking out against the world.

“Stop. It.” Gyda’s voice is low and terrible and commanding.

Athelstan catches at her sleeve, his trembling fingers slipping across the dirty linen. “Do not fight over this,” he begs her.

But she ignores him, and Bjorn draws himself up straight under her glare, clenching his fists so that they match hers, two bloodless hands pressed at his sides. The children are a reflection of each other now, their faces so alike in anger that they could be twins.

Bjorn tries on an unconvincing sneer. “Shall I apologise to the sticks on the fire too? The ground that I walk on?”

Gyda growls. “Athelstan. Is not. A _thing_.”

“By law he _is_ , Gyda, don’t you see?”

From Athelstan’s place on the ground it seems that her eyes flash. “The law is a pig’s balls!” she shouts. “It doesn’t know him. It doesn’t care that he is loyal and clever and kind. But I do, and Father does too, and he wouldn’t like the way you speak to him.”

That hits, and Bjorn shows the impact with a tiny flinch.

“Athelstan is a good man,” Gyda continues, pressing her advantage. “What kind of man have you been since you got your arm ring? Selfish and thoughtless and cruel. You demand respect, and you think that…” she waves her hand at him, “… _stupid_ piece of metal gives it to you by right. It does not! Ask yourself, would Father follow you into battle if you weren’t his son? Would he fight by you in the shield wall? Or would he hate you, like he hates the Earl? If you think that being a man means trampling on those beneath you then _you_ know nothing about what pleases him.” She takes a gulping breath, swallowing down tears of rage. “And if you do not stop it, I will make you sorry.”

Bjorn is stunned silent. His expression is a tangled mix of emotion - bewilderment and exasperation and shame. “Gyda…” he starts, then stumbles to a halt. It is the shame that finally wins and he looks down at his feet, scuffing them on the ground, the very picture of a chastened child. “You were supposed to be asleep,” he mutters.

“You do not threaten people as quietly as you think,” she says. “And I heard the owl too. I am not deaf.” Gyda shrugs her shoulders heavily. “You are not the only one growing up, Bjorn, if only you will leave us room to do it.”

A wind picks up, swift and cool, shivering the boughs of the covering oaks and sweeping across Athelstan’s clammy skin. Clumps of white woolly clouds appear in the sky, edging down from the north, their underbellies swirling like froth on the sea. And the ravens’ outcry echoes still, back and forth across the valley.

With his gaze still downward, Bjorn shuffles closer, until his elbow brushes Gyda’s and Athelstan is staring up at the round of his chin. Bjorn uncurls one fist, taps his palm against his trousers then, with a nervous up-down movement, holds it out to Athelstan. Athelstan takes it, his fingers still shaking, tapping against Bjorn’s wrist.

“You stink,” Bjorn blurts out, pulling Athelstan to his feet.

And from somewhere Athelstan finds the ability to laugh, though it is shakier than his hands.

“We all do,” Gyda says, pulling at her shift where it is stuck to her back. She freezes in that position, her cheeks blanching a sudden, deathly white. “Bjorn? Are there bears here?”

Bjorn jerks towards her. “No?” he says, but there is a hesitance there that is hard to dismiss, and Athelstan can see his mind working, a ripple of fear across his face, as he remembers everything they have done wrong if there are. “Father hunts above the lake when he wants bearskin. Why?”

Gyda points ahead. Twenty feet away, at the base of an oak, is the splintered remnant of a large nest. Athelstan looks about, but all he can see is more trees, and all he can hear is the noise of the ravens’ grief filling the air.

“Maybe a lynx,” Bjorn says, hopeful, and wanders over. He prods the broken nest with his foot. The woven twigs scrape against the tree in a misshapen claw and pieces of the moss lining and drifts of downy feathers have sloughed off onto the ground. Bjorn heaves the nest over, examining it. “No young left.”

The ravens alight in the lower branches of the oak, staring down at the remains of their nest with expressions so intent that they seem human. When Bjorn begins picking up pieces of it the male shrugs his wings up and back as a man rearranging his cloak, the feathers creaking against each other like rubbed silk, and Athelstan sees that he is missing a tail feather.

“There are no tracks.” Bjorn says, giving the nest a final, lazy kick. “It must have come down by itself.”

But then where are the young? Athelstan cannot help but think of the elk, of Sjurd and Uxi’s wolf, of how he and the children came to be on the wrong side of the river in the first place, chasing a mystery.

The raven puts his head back and lets out a long, mournful croak, a sound of such groaning agony that the back of Athelstan’s neck goes cold. He steps back, uncomfortable at Bjorn’s intrusion. The raven takes to flight at the same time, sweeping low over Bjorn’s head in the direction of the cliff. Bjorn utters a startled noise and ducks, stumbling a few steps away from the nest. But Athelstan watches the raven glide through the trees on nimble wings, iridescent, until at last he lands again, almost out of sight, at the place where the unconquerable face of the cliff is broken by a rockslide. The once sharp edges of the shattered rocks are weather-worn and in every crack and crevice plants are creeping - stubborn grass and feathery moss, speedwell and wild strawberry, a host of green and blue and white and red, marking out a stairway onto the ridge.

***

The ridge is like a different world. Gone is the enclosing throng of trees, here the rugged granite floor stretches on before them in a seemingly unbroken line to touch the far horizon. The change is so stark that it feels like a plain of desolation at first, but as they walk on, relieved at the faster path than the forest’s drudgery, colour blooms around them. Bright pools of purple heather nestle in every hollow, the short mountain birches raise themselves in cautious coils from crevices, their branches reaching out all in one direction, like a group of dancers all frozen mid-step of the same dance.

Bjorn thumps Athelstan’s arm with the back of his fist, nodding past one lonely, twisted tree that shivers its leaves in the wind. “Not much longer now.” The tree points southwards, at the overhang that sweeps out from the ridge and looms across the river, a solid brushstroke of glistening silver against the green hills behind. It is in the middle distance now, close enough to feel attainable before the lengthy dusk falls. “Past that, we are as good as home. And then you will have to wash, or Mother will make you sleep with the goats.”

“I am looking forward to clean clothes,” Athelstan says, rubbing the new sore spot on his arm, too caught up in the warm glow of his own cautious relief to tease in return. Though thoughts of the farm - with Ragnar bored and petty and nowhere to go but that one room for the whole long winter - sits heavy in his stomach like a too-rich meal eaten too quickly.

The wind calms for a breath, and for a moment Athelstan is aware of the burning sun on the top of his head before it turns wild again. The clouds puff by low in the current of that wind, flat blue beneath, piled up in generous boiling mounds above, their edges gilded by the sun. Behind, to the north, they cluster closer and closer together until they meet in a long, flanking arc that stretches from one side of the sky to the other, covering the tips of the western mountains in the crest of its rolling grey wave.

“Is that above the lake?” Athelstan thinks he can see the snake of the river disappearing beneath the cloud, but the world below it is too distant and hazy with shadow to be sure. And at a second glance, squinting to catch details, the haze must be the thick mist of rain.

Bjorn hunches his body against the wind, leaning against the warmth of Frodi’s body beside him, and turns to follow Athelstan’s gaze. “Maybe. The river will not get any lower, then.”

Below, the river’s foam-flecked surface rolls on, choppy. “Not soon,” Athelstan says.

Gyda gives the bank of cloud a nervous glance and tugs at Bjorn’s sleeve. “We should walk faster.”

The air grows steadily colder as the ridge climbs towards the overhang. Underfoot, the rock loses its warmth to the scouring wind, the leading edge of which becomes knife-sharp and icy, cutting through Athelstan’s threadbare tunic as if nothing is there at all and slashing at his bruised back with unexpected bursts of fury.

“Cold,” Gyda stutters, at one particularly savage gust that snaps the branches of the nearby birches into rigour. Her voice is barely audible over its piercing whistle and she steps closer to Athelstan without speaking again, tucking herself deep into the crook of his arm. He stops walking in surprise. Gentle human contact is a thing that has long been lacking in his life, so much so that he has all but forgotten the sensation of a warm shoulder against his, let alone that of a companionable embrace.

“You look like a scarecrow.” Bjorn flaps his arms out in good-natured mimicry of Athelstan’s helpless position. Then the wind gusts again, knocking Bjorn forward a step and he laughs and tucks his hands back into his armpits for warmth.

Gyda tugs at Athelstan’s hand, jolting his wrist and the pain knocks Athelstan out of his self-consciousness with a sharp shock. He bites his teeth together, letting her wrap his arm around her shoulder and fold her small fingers between his like hands clasped for prayer. They are ice cold.

“How much farther now, Bjorn?” she chatters out.

“What am I, a bird? You can see as well as I can.”

Though there are no birds in the sky, Athelstan notices. Even the hawk has taken shelter from the wind, and the expanse is empty from horizon to horizon of anything but clouds. It feels lonely, up here.

The birches creak and shiver and Bjorn raises his voice over them as they pass. “You cannot be that cold, you are the only one wearing an overtunic.”

Gyda’s chuckle hums through Athelstan’s chest. “You can have it back if you want.” She wiggles a foot out in the air, the leather ends rattling against each other in the wind.

“No use now, it is all out of shape.”

Athelstan wishes for his thick winter habit, which kept off the worst of even the wildest English winters, when the northern winds screamed under the chapel door at night and drove needles of ice into their faces as they crossed the yard to the dormitory, when the sea churned and rose and crashed with such lofty ferocity over the rocks that it seemed sure to flood the island entire. But he left it in his chest at Lindisfarne and it will belong to someone else now, just like his bed and his desk and place in the choir. It seems strange to admit it, that in some ways he is just as easily replaced there as he is here.

Gyda’s shivering turns to a violent trembling despite sharing Athelstan’s warmth, her elbow knocking into his bruised stomach, repetitive and sickening. He peers ahead, looking for some sign that they will get out of the cold soon. The overhang is close enough now that Athelstan can pick out details on it. In the very centre, a lone mountain birch stands guard, pointing south to the far edge where two piles of stones - built up like doorposts - frame a piece of the sky. It is darker than it should be at the third quarter of a summer’s day, washed the deep blue of hidden ocean depths.

“Way-markers,” Bjorn calls, seeing the pillars at the same time, and the sun slips partially behind a cloud, trimming them in dazzling gold.

“Pillars of fire,” Gyda says, twisting to look up at Athelstan, “don’t you think?”

The pillars themselves are signs enough, he thinks, and he opens his mouth to say so but his teeth chatter so hard they snap shut on his tongue. He swallows blood and that, at least, is warm.

“So long as that is not our pillar of cloud,” Bjorn nods to the north, “or we are in trouble.” He tucks his hands further into his armpits, bent over like a withered old man, as if doing so will lessen the bite of the wind that drives behind them.

It catches in Gyda’s skirts, twisting her against Athelstan’s grip and he tightens his arm about her, his muscles knitted tight from cold.

“I thought you hated Athelstan’s stories.”

“That one has an army at least. Although it would be better with sea monsters. Walk faster, Gyda.”

Gyda merely nods in response, her hair tickling Athelstan’s neck.

Athelstan looks over his shoulder. The ridge ends at the rockslide now, the rest swallowed by the long grey cloud and the wall of rain beneath it. And behind that roiling line a monstrous black cloud has gathered, as large as a mountain, spreading upwards until it presses against the ceiling of the world.

“So much for the Gods, huh?” Bjorn shouts over the howling wind, “they were _laughing_ at us.”

Athelstan’s stomach flip-flops as if it is rolling downhill without him. “We need to get off the ridge.” The cloud is advancing quickly. Already the rockslide has been consumed.

“You think saying so will slow it down?” Bjorn casts him a glance and gives a dismissive shake of his head. “And what advice does your precious book have?”

Athelstan flounders. He has read it ten times over since Ragnar first dragged him into the yard of the longhouse, yet it has been so silent the words will not stay in his mind as they used to.

“’Walk while you have the Light,’” is the first thing that comes to mind, and he recites it carefully, tongue clumsy, mind slow to translate, “’lest darkness come upon you; for he that walks in the darkness knows not where he goes.’”

Bjorn snorts. “Anyone with half a mind knows that already.”

There is a crackling feel to the air and a smell of coming rain that sparks a familiar hollow dread. It takes Athelstan longer than it should to recognise it, that the fear of an approaching storm is now irrevocably linked with the ripping apart of his world.

There is no warmth to be had any more. The air around them is chill and wet as the mist of a waterfall or the depths of a cavern. Already the ground is becoming slick and treacherous and Gyda’s feet slip out from beneath her as she stumbles beside him. Athelstan tightens his grip on her, and she weaves her arm around his waist and holds onto his belt.

Bjorn grabs a handful of the fur on Frodi’s back, steadying himself. The pillars are tantalisingly near, but the cloud is upon them now, its arms stretching out around them for miles in a terrible embrace. To the west it slips rapidly across cliffs and crevices, tumbling over the rocky heights like a flooding wave, reaching round towards the sun.

Athelstan’s hair whips into his eyes. When he blinks them open again after the sting the sun is gone and the world has turned grey.

It begins to rain.


	12. Chapter 12

The rain arrives in a sudden, pelting tempest, driven straight at their backs by the buffeting wind. It is colder than the river, like being encased in ice, and Athelstan’s breaths stutter at the shock of it. He drops his head, fighting against the quaking tension of his body to gasp in air while water pours down his face like a flood. Within the shrouding rain, Bjorn is a mere shadow of a shape ahead. It seems he looks back - there is some vague impression of such a movement in the wavering gloom - but it could just as easily be a trick of the eyes. Athelstan tugs Gyda closer into the small, protective warmth of his arm. Hers is the clumsy, stumbling gait of one who is cold-drunk, kicking her toes into the ground and wobbling from side to side. With her head bowed against his chest, all he can see of her is her little drenched head and the grey curve of her shoulders, sloughing water like river rocks.

Then the first rumbles of thunder begin overhead. The noise rolls out from the cloud above in a deep, roaring boom that seems to swell inside Athelstan’s skull until it fills all the space, pressing out on his temples and humming through his eye sockets. It cracks off the surrounding hills, bouncing back and forth from ridge to ridge in an endless, undiminishing echo. It sounds as if the very demons of hell have been unleashed against them. And just as the cacophony is fading at last, groaning back into the earth, a fresh roar breaks out, shouting again in a new and terrible tongue.

Athelstan has never heard anything like the monstrous noise of the storm. Small wonder the Northmen believe their world is filled with gods and monsters - with their shouting in the wind, their revelry in the crash of thunder, their faces burnt onto the rocks at each flash of lightning. And as he stumbles on, Gyda’s hand clenching his, the grinding of Thor’s chariot wheels rolls on above, chasing them across the never-ending rock.

He has lost sight of Bjorn. The dark is otherworldly, a gloom that is almost night but tinged with a strange, violet hue. Above them, the cloud is a swallowing blackness so close and thick it seems he can reach up and take a piece in his hand and Athelstan’s heart pounds so hard that it steals his breath.

“Bjorn!” The wind sweeps his shout away into silence the moment it leaves his lips and if Bjorn responds that too must be quieted, because nothing returns. Even the wind is drowned out by the thrum of thunder, ebbing and flowing into a constancy, the way an incoming tide crosses over itself as it advances. Lightning flashes again, this time bursting out from the cloud and across the sky in roots of pure white. For but a sliver of a moment, everything is illuminated in it, edged with the brilliant light as if they are standing within a sun - the ground and the mountains and the expanse of the covered sky all frozen in the flash of it. Too late, Athelstan snaps his eyes shut and the light remains, seared into his vision with the shape of the land in front of him. It is still there when he opens them again, the fading image of the lightning root splashed across the tumultuous shadow of the rock beneath his feet.

He slows, blinking, tripping about the constant obstacle of Gyda’s unsure feet. Any step now might take them over the edge of a fall he has not seen approaching within the flash-and-dark of this unnatural midnight. He has no idea where they are. Gyda rolls her head a little, pressing her ear into Athelstan’s collarbone. Her hair is somehow twisted up in the ties of his tunic, trailing water down his chest. The skin on his arm prickles.

Then out of the darkness a tree appears, the twisted spectre of a mountain ash, arriving with such little warning that Athelstan kicks his toes into its wide spiderweb of roots. Numb with cold, the impact is little more than an unexpected pressure preceding a complicated slip and tumble to one side. In the darkness and confusion, Gyda falls away from him. Athelstan grabs out at her with a rain-slicked hand, catching something in the hazy shadow. The hair stands up on the back of his neck and his cross - twisted around on its leather thong - buzzes against his collarbone. A deafening crack splits the air, snapping through his bones, and everything turns white.

He wakes up on the ground, his head in a puddle, his ears ringing, rain pattering down on his face. The tree showers bright red embers into the air like wind-scattered blossoms. The ringing continues, singing the higher part of the song that the thunder started, both muffled by the water in his ear. But Athelstan knows where he is now and he pushes himself back up, shaking his head against the disorientation of noise and light. Halfway up from his knees, Gyda’s hand slips into his, squeezing around his fingers.

They stumble on together towards the waymarkers, finding their way by the lightning’s momentary brightnesses, showing here one pillar, there another, and the solid pitch of utter nothingness between them. Athelstan prays for solid ground and steps through. The sky flickers. White. Black. There is earth underfoot now _\- thank the Lord -_ and rain streams across the ground. They follow it downward, slipping and sliding, away from the exposed ridge where the tumult boils.

“Bjorn!”

Thunder booms, but the rain is quieter here, soaking into soft earth.

“Athelstan! Where have you two been? This way.”

Everyone is a muted grey now - Gyda and Bjorn and Frodi - as if they are made only of shadow and shadow’s fickle edges, but Athelstan follows Bjorn’s smaller form to the left and beneath the ridge into a natural shelter that delves back deep beneath the rock. The air becomes stiller and quieter and cooler the further in they go, and they drop to the ground where the rock roof slopes down to meet dry earth at last.

“What’s wrong with Gyda?” Bjorn’s voice is loud and hollow in the echoing space, while outside the rain hisses between ferocious rolls of thunder.

On his knees, half-leaning against the sloping wall, Athelstan shakes his head. He is soaked to the skin, water running in rivulets down the inside of his sleeve. The echo of his own breath repeats from the wall as if there are two of him, shoulder to shoulder in the cold damp.

“Why don’t you ask Gyda?” Gyda protests, though her vehemence is ruined by the loud snap of her teeth chattering together. “My f-feet are n-numb again.” And she slaps at them with hands that show ghostly pale in each flash of colourless light. In the dimness, Gyda’s eyes are the dark blue of a starlit night, glazed with unshed tears. “I can manage,” she says, when Bjorn squats down beside her, reaching out, “don’t fuss.”

“I am not fussing.”

“You fuss like my goats!” And she kicks out at him, knocking him back into Frodi, who yelps and skitters away.

“Do it yourself then!” Bjorn falls back on his heels, scrubbing hard at his eyes. “You are as bad as Father.”

“I am not.” Gyda unwraps her feet and contorts herself into a cross-legged position to knead at them with both hands. Somewhere above them rain is dripping through the rock with a bright _plip-plip-plip_. “We need a fire.”

Bjorn lets out a heavy breath. “I know.” He sounds as exhausted as Athelstan feels, like there is no strength left in his body at all.

“I will go.” Athelstan braces a hand on the wall and tries to get up again, but his wobbling legs don’t seem to want to cooperate.

Gyda stops him with a hand on his elbow. “Athelstan? What is wrong with your arm?”

He looks down in surprise. It is difficult to see shadow from colour here, but his left sleeve is darker than his right. He lifts his hand and in the next flash of lightning it glows red. That is not water dripping from his sleeve.

The moment he notices it the pain flares - a burning, stabbing line stretching from his elbow to his neck. He collapses back to the ground with a sharp intake of breath. A fire burns through the bone and each pulse of his heart throbs with a warm, squelching release of blood. It snakes down the inside of his sleeve and pours out of the cuff in a dozen merging and splitting streams, like a river delta. Athelstan screws his eyes shut and concentrates on breathing.

Bjorn scrambles across the floor, clothing scraping the rock. “I can’t see,” he mutters, and tugs at Athelstan’s sleeve, slipping it up his blood-slicked arm.

Gyda scuffles about. “There is no wood.”

“Anything will do, I just need light.”

Bjorn tugs again and the linen catches on something. It hurts - a sharp, jolting hurt. Athelstan’s breath becomes a wheeze. His head pounds. Bjorn mutters curses against the weather and the dark and a dozen other inconveniences and keeps tugging at the linen until it rips free.

Gyda makes a panicked humming noise. “I don’t know how well this will burn, it’s all wet.”

Bjorn does not answer, but the strike of the flint and steel is unmistakable even through the noise of the storm and a small yellow light flickers up on the other side of Athelstan’s closed eyelids, accompanied by the smell of pine and burning cloth.

Bjorn leans closer, his breath puffing hot into Athelstan’s ear. His hand squeezes tight around Athelstan’s elbow. “Hold still. If you move, I’ll stab you.”

That is all the warning Athelstan gets before there is a sharp pressure in the meat of his arm and pain spears inwards to the bone. He stiffens and the pain grows even sharper, shooting through his arm like the lightning outside, convulsing his fingers. He bites his teeth together.

“Do not move!” Bjorn emphasises his words by tightening his grip yet again, pinning Athelstan’s elbow against Bjorn’s raised knee. “There is something in here. What _is_ that? Gyda, more light.”

There is a tugging sensation and more sharp, radiating pain. Athelstan bows his head and tries to obey. His breathing staggers and the pain washes up in ever-increasing waves, hotter and hotter, more insistent.

“It’s all bits of wood. The storm tried to turn you into a yule log.”

“What,” Athelstan gasps, between waves of pain, “is a yule log?”

Bjorn snorts. “You and your questions. Be quiet, I’m concentrating.”

Athelstan loses sense of time. Bjorn prods and pulls, the pain flows and ebbs and flows again, higher, like an incoming tide. “Pater noster,” he whispers through clenched teeth, “qui es in caelis—”

Bjorn braces a hand on his shoulder, bloody fingers swiping at the side of Athelstan’s neck, and agony erupts just above his shoulder-blade, twisting and digging and working itself deep, deep into the flesh. Athelstan presses his forehead against his knee, groaning deep in his throat.

“Be gentle with him.”

“Now who is fussing? This is the last one anyway.” Something clatters on the ground. “Now we just need to wash out all the holes.”

At that, Athelstan allows himself to drift.

In Eldwyn’s herb garden, tucked against the outside wall of the priory, the everthroat has dried needle-sharp under the summer sun. Athelstan tramps through the prostrate stems, trailing his scapular behind him, mindful to sweep it through the biggest, thorniest leaves. He stomps on one round, purple flower head as he goes, and it collapses into dust inside its crown of thorns.

“Here, boy,” Eldwyn calls, from down the perfumed path, “leave your destruction alone for a while and come make yourself useful.”

Athelstan shrugs, pouting, but he drops the scapular onto the wheelbarrow full of fresh dung and does as he is bid. And with strong, calloused hands Eldwyn shows Athelstan how to loose the angelica seeds from the upright stalks and send them pattering down like a summer rain onto the prepared cloth, and how to cut down the hollow stems of sweet cicely and tie them into even little bundles.

“You have this one,” he says then, “while you fetch me some waybroad. Three big leaves, lad, I’m working up a cure for that merchant fellow.” And Athelstan scuttles off to complete his task, sucking the stem - honey-sweet - between his teeth.

***

When he wakes, it is dark outside, this time from night. Gyda and Frodi are asleep in a bundle by a slow fire, her head on his side, his lips puffing up with small, hollow woofs. Bjorn stands at the close edge of the shelter, his arms crossed, staring out into the black rain. Athelstan struggles to his feet, keeping his throbbing left arm tucked against his chest, and joins him there.

“Still raining,” he says, for something to say, though the rain drums on the toes of their damp shoes and spits in their faces.

“Mmm.”

The storm has eased from a violent lashing into a steady downpour, but the cloud must still be boiling thick overhead for there is no moon or stars or inkling of light from above. The low flickering of the fire throws shadow over the glistening mud on the threshold of the shelter and there is, within the deep darkness, the faint outline of trees in front, but nothing else of note.

“When did you hurt your wrist?” Bjorn asks, interrupting the lonely quiet.

At the reminder, the ache of it throbs up low beneath all the others. Athelstan rubs at it, slipping his fingers beneath the cuff of his tunic, and finds more linen beneath, wrapped in a tight bandage around it. “Where did you get this?”

“Gyda’s shift. Answer my question.”

Athelstan turns his hand this way and that, feeling the resultant burn of all his cumulative injuries working upwards along his arm and through his shoulder. “In the river.”

“And catching me.” Bjorn stares ahead, though there is nothing he can be looking at in that pitch darkness, and plucks at the folds of his tunic at the elbow. “She was knocked in by a branch. But _you_ , you went in because you would not let go of her. Do you remember that?”

Athelstan remembers darkness and fear and disorientation, but he has never been able to put the pieces together into a picture, he only has mismatched parts of the whole. He shakes his head.

“Each time she went under she took you down with her. I was sure you had both drowned, half a dozen times. But you would not let go and save yourself. Why?” Bjorn turns his head a little, and the firelight catches a glistening at the corner of his eye.

And this, Athelstan realises, is what Bjorn has been hesitating to ask since the afternoon of the flood. But Athelstan does not know how to answer. “I wanted to keep my lungs,” he says, because he can think of nothing else. He smiles a little, partly teasing, partly because he has never doubted for a moment that Lagertha would do it, that she might still, and the reality is too horrific to contemplate.

But Bjorn shakes his head, slow and thoughtful. “No. You didn’t have time to think about it, to decide. Not in the river, not with the rockslide. Tell the truth.”

“I made an oath, to take care of you.”

“You could have died.”

Now Athelstan is confused, and he knows it is written plainly across his face. “You think I should not have saved you?”

“You are a slave,” Bjorn says, as if that answers everything, “I tried to kill you.”

“With the _blunt_ knife.”

“I could have done it.”

Athelstan remembers that part very well. “I know.”

“I only didn’t because Father would be disappointed in me,” Bjorn says, though he looks ashamed of it now, head down, still pulling at his tunic. “You could have let us both die. You could kill us now and run and no one would ever know you did it.” He abandons the linen and looks up, catching Athelstan’s eyes. “Why don’t you? And don’t tell me about your stupid promise and your slave’s duty. Tell me the _truth_.”

Athelstan stares back at him, speechless, until Bjorn turns away again, staring back out at the rain. And at last Athelstan answers with a bewildered, “I… I do not know.”

***

The rain does not stop and by dawn the hillside has become a quagmire. The ground outside the shelter is thick brown mud, churned up into swirling, sucking eddies. The rain pours in narrow waterfalls at the entrance of the shelter. It streams down the slope from the ridge and across the lower ground in rippling courses wide as a river.

The moment Athelstan steps from dirt-sprinkled rock of the shelter floor to the softer ground outside, his legs disappear down into the sucking mud up to his calves. He has a moment of panicked floundering before he stops sinking, his heart jolting at the memory of being pulled into the river, at the choking water over his face mimicked now by the pelting rain. Even once he has found solidity, the mud gurgles ominous threats around his legs and slips into his shoes, cold and heavy, and the uneasy feeling of being swept away remains.

The hillside is steep here, sweeping from the foot of the ridge and the dark mouth of their shelter down to a muddy edge that ends abruptly in tree tops and Athelstan, wading along through the squelching mud, has no doubt that a slip will send him over it and a long way down before his fall is violently interrupted.

He stops at the top of a fallen maple, folded in a neat genuflection over the edge, its crown sprawling in the mud. Down the length of its visible trunk, a lightning strike has engraved a picture of itself through the bark. And Athelstan works his way around the crown, snapping off the smaller deadwood and the remains of the lightning’s entry branch, splintered and marked with a single black spot. He grapples his way from branch to branch, stacking the wood up in the crook of his left arm and grimacing to himself. There will be time enough later to rest and let the throbbing subside. They won’t be going onwards today.

In the centre of the crown, where the tree’s two main limbs split up and apart from the bole, the mud has formed a lake in the space between. Athelstan juggles the wood to his right side and leans into the slope to cross it, his feet sinking into the bubbling earth, leaving two lines of tracks behind him that slowly fill up again with mud.

Halfway across, he almost steps on a rabbit. The poor creature is so deeply trapped in the mud that all Athelstan can see of it is one large, glassy eye, the tip of a gasping mouth and a foreleg, scratching slow circles in the mud. It may as well be digging the ocean, the mud simply slops downhill, making way for more to slide down into place or bubble up from below. It must have been there for some time already because each fluttering gasp that disturbs the glistening surface of the mud is followed by a long, exhausted stillness. Athelstan feels sorry for it, hungry as he is, but it is clearly beyond saving and a swiftly broken neck before a roasting will be a good deal kinder than the slow, suffocating death it is suffering now.

He is shuffling his bundle of wood again, trying to find a way to grab up the rabbit without over-balancing and tumbling down the hill, when the ravens appear. Athelstan watches them turn against the drab grey sky, blinking rain out of his eyes. They are low enough that he can see the rippling edges of their feathers in the wind, the up-down flick of their wing tips as they choose direction, the missing tail feather. They circle for a while, heads cocked down to watch Athelstan watching them. Then, with an abrupt turn, the male swoops down, alighting on a branch at the edge of Athelstan’s little lake. The bough bounces under his weight and drops a shower of raindrops into the mud. The raven turns one beady eye onto the rabbit - which is dead now, mouth open to the pouring mud - and then cocks his head at Athelstan, staring. Athelstan stares back, mesmerised.

The raven croaks, a quiet noise in the back of his throat that sounds almost… sad. Then he steps from the branch, glossy wings outspread, and glides down onto the rabbit’s chest, the mud-slick fur wrinkling into thick folds between each clawed toe.

“No. No!” Athelstan flails forward through the mud, flapping one hand out in a shooing motion. “Go away.”

 _Crawk_ , the raven says. C _rawk_. And with a great heave of his wings he takes to the air again, the rabbit hanging limp beneath him, the female following close behind.

“No, no, no!” But they are gone. The sky is empty and soundless except for the hush of falling rain. All that is left is a form in the mud where the rabbit was, which quickly fills again with brown water. So much for their meal. Athelstan spits the rain from his lips, tightens his arm around his sodden firewood and trudges back to the shelter.

Inside the children are both sprawled on their stomachs by a puddle in a rock hollow. The rain adds to it in steady drips and one edge of it stretches to form a small stream across the lumpy floor, trickling downhill.

Athelstan squelches across behind them to the fire, leaving lumps of mud behind at each step, and drops the wood there with a clatter. His arm is a layered pain, and he groans like an old man upon straightening, rubbing around the tender area at the back of his shoulder.

“You should not have gone out.” Gyda rests her chin on her crossed arms, looking at him sidelong with a single raised eyebrow.

Her tone is part motherly concern and part ‘I warned you’, and Athelstan answers with a tilted head and an unrepentant look. “I think if anyone has to risk their limbs in that mire it should not be either of you.”

“No better, then?” Bjorn creates a storm in the puddle water with his fingers, capsizing Gyda’s leaf boat. Her twig sailor falls out and bobs across the waves until she rescues it.

“Worse, I think. I would not like to test our luck with it yet.” He is not giving unexpected news and Bjorn receives it silently. Athelstan rolls his shoulder a final time, then squats down to spread out the wood to dry by the fire, taking the opportunity to warm his frigid hands. The fire is a welcome warmth in the cool of the shelter, warmer since the wind died during the night. Perhaps that is why Gyda’s face is flushed.

She sighs a long sigh. “When do you think we will get home?”

“It is not so far from here,” Bjorn says. “Perhaps a day, once the rain stops.” He sits up, scratches at an itch on his eyebrow and sends his boat down the stream onto the rocks, where it scrapes up onto dry land.

“I hope my goats are safe.”

Bjorn rubs the top of Gyda’s head. “They will have moved all the animals first, silly.”

She grumbles and swipes his hand away, then pushes herself up far enough to rest her chin in her hand and starts drawing idle shapes with the other in the thin layer of dust. She stretches her bare feet out behind her, propping them on Frodi’s exposed belly where he is laid out with all four paws knotted together. He makes a low, rumbling sound, as if attempting to imitate a cat’s purr. Outside the grey sun creeps across the grey sky.

“What is that supposed to say?”

“Get your head out of the way, Bjorn. I cannot see past your big ears.”

“What does it say?”

Whatever it was, she swipes the dust clean of it in a single sharp movement, biting her lip. The leather cord slips up her neck at the jerking motion, dangling loose like another strand of hair. She tries to write Athelstan’s name in English next - large and wobbly - but she muddles her _aesc_ and _os_ at the beginning and gives up with a sharp sigh of irritation in the middle, leaving a shaky _‘Othl…_ ’ in the dirt, followed by a confusion of runes that are neither English nor Norse. She sweeps those last away too and wipes the resulting mess off on the remains of her shift. She looks like a beggar child - her clothing dusty and unravelling at the now knee-length hem, her hair unkempt, her foot-wrappings black at the soles and showing slices of ruined socks. In truth all three of them look terrible - unfed and desperate as a troop of beggars.

Athelstan drops down beside Bjorn, sighing, and begins turning Gyda’s writing into pictures. A few sharp lines turn the errant _os_ into a warrior, using the _thorn_ as a shield. Gyda smiles and changes the _lago_ into an enemy warrior with a helm balanced precariously on top of his head, holding a spear that looks like a carrot. Bjorn leans over to see what Athelstan is laughing at and stretches between them to add a bear beneath the battle, one foreleg three times the length of the other, reaching up and around the little men. Gyda giggles.

Bjorn pouts, flushing red across his freckled cheek. “At least he is not fighting with a vegetable.”

Athelstan roots around on the floor for a thin twig and uses it to even the bear’s arms out, adding claws and fur. He makes the bear roar, lips pulled back to show fearsome teeth. One of the warriors turns to fight - Athelstan smooths out the lines he no longer wants, redraws the figure to face the bear, shield up, giving him a vague expression of grim resignation. The other drops his spear to the ground and turns to run, but soon he will trip over a rock in his hurry - Athelstan scrawls in the shape of it next to his foot - and his fall will attract the bear’s attention…

“How do you do that?” Bjorn peers over his shoulder, so close that his chin stabs at Athelstan’s collarbone when he moves.

Athelstan blinks. “Practice,” he says, after a hesitation, “This was my work, back in England.”

“Making pictures?” Bjorn asks, his face screwed up in doubt.

“Making books.”

“Oh,” Bjorn sits back down, hugging a knee, “like the one you brought with you?”

“Like that one, yes.” He was painting a dragon before Ragnar came. Of course, that was all destroyed in the fire. Years of work gone in only a matter of hours. All those people gone in less even than that.

Bjorn shakes his head to himself. “I do not understand you English priests. If your words and pictures are so important why would you not fight for them?”

“Some do. Some go to battle. But we had always been safe.” He told Ragnar the same, ale spilling out of his cup, the room swimming from how much he had already drunk. And safety had become complacency, and complacency pride, until everything had to be stripped away. Athelstan looks back down at the warrior he is drawing. He is on the ground now, his helm fallen off, his hands raised in useless defence. The bear’s claws are large and terrifying. ‘In the world you have tribulation,’ that is what his book tells him, ‘but take courage…’ Athelstan is not so good at the courage part.

Gyda rocks sideways and bumps his foot with hers. “If you had fought, Father would have killed you. It is as it should be.” She looks at Bjorn. “’We are not in charge of our fate—’”

“’—it is already written.’ I know.” Bjorn taps his knee. The line of blisters on his palm have burst and split to reveal new, pink skin beneath, though it is dusted with dirt like everything else. “But I would have fought anyway, or run.”

Athelstan covers the downed warrior with his palm. Osbhert tried running. Athelstan keeps telling himself that he might have survived the crossing, it is more comforting to think so. But there are two miles of open fields between the priory and the causeway. And it was high tide. He brushes the warrior away. “And if you could not fight? If there was nowhere to run?”

“Then I would die with my family,” Bjorn says, earnest, his gaze unflinching. “What use is it to die for words?”

Athelstan’s thoughts are so tangled that he cannot form a response for a long time. He thinks of Lindisfarne’s bloody sand and the black cloud that swept up from the horizon long after land itself had fallen out of sight. He has been left adrift ever since, directionless in a sea of unanswerable questions. “Not for the words,” he manages at last, grasping at the form of something that as yet he cannot fully make out, an echo of last night’s conversation. Not for the words. “For the truth.” The truth is worth dying for, like jumping into the river with Gyda, even if he doesn’t quite know why. But Athelstan has been called to live for it and he doesn’t yet know how.


	13. Chapter 13

Athelstan opens sleep-blurred eyes to golden light. Dawn’s first rays have already broken over the ridge, gilding the wet earth, and on the trees the clustered raindrops become sparks of liquid fire that shimmer hot and bright all along the branches. It has been so long since he has woken after dawn that Athelstan has forgotten how it feels to open his eyes to light instead of the pitch dark of pure night or the dull grey of pre-dawn. There is an edge of warm familiarity in it, a memory so far removed that he can find only a shadow of it. He shuts his eyes again, the daylight playing bright patterns on his eyelids, and there it is, in the sticky pressure of feet pressed into the backs of his knees and the stale odour of wet dog. Old Brun always would sneak under the blankets with him and his brothers if she could get away with it.

But that’s not where he is now. Now, here, his body aches from top to bottom, there is a new twinge in his neck from sleeping twisted on the hard ground and the cavernous emptiness in his stomach has grown overnight into a wider, consuming hollow. A breeze flutters on his face and Athelstan gives up his sleeping all together and sits up, slow and wincing.

Behind, between him and the dead fire, the children sprawl out in every direction like a pile of discarded toys. Gyda lies with one hand under her sweaty face - the sleeve of her shift etching a swirling pattern in red across her cheek and eyebrow - and the other behind her, her fingers in a loose crab on Frodi’s back. Her elbow is in a knot with Bjorn’s who shifts now, with a sleepy mumble, and kicks his feet further up between Athelstan’s knees. Again, there is a whisper of cold air, accompanied by a slapping noise, and Athelstan disentangles himself from Bjorn’s sweaty feet, scrubbing his sleepy eyes into wakefulness.

Beside the puddle, a bedraggled blackbird flaps one mud-sticky wing, the feathers all now a matted brown like Bjorn’s dirty hair. She plunges her head beneath the surface of the water and out again, shaking the drops over her back in sparkling showers, ruffling her feathers and puffing out a brown, speckled chest. She washes until the puddle water turns cloudy, then hops across the floor of the shelter and out into a patch of sunlight, her feathers puffed out about her to dry.

Bjorn snores, a soft snort at the end of every long breath. Beneath that there is an absence, now that the blackbird’s washday is finished, and the puddle lies flat as a mill pond. Athelstan, hit by the realisation of what is missing, utters a sharp admonition under his breath and grips Bjorn by the shoulder, his fingers slipping round the curve of fat-padded bone, shaking him awake.

Bjorn grunts and sits up with his eyes still closed, fumbling for his sax. “What is it?”

“The rain has stopped,” Athelstan says. It is no longer tinkling into the puddle, no longer whispering on the muddy earth outside. What Athelstan took to be the soft haze of drizzle was in fact only the morning mist. “It has stopped,” he says again, and Bjorn’s bleary surprise becomes a lopsided grin.

“Finally.” Bjorn turns and wakes Gyda with a careless shove to her side that spills her over onto her face.

She flails, her hand slapping to the ground, stopping her fall. “Urgh. What is wrong with you?”

Bjorn starts tugging his shoes on, his smile spreading across his cheek into the red patch their pillow of rock has left there. “The rain has stopped. We can go home.”

“Oh,” she breathes out, “that’s good.” But she stays there, her feet stretched out in the dust, blinking in deep disorientation. High on her cheekbones, her skin has the red, sticky look of a fever.

“You are sick.” Athelstan crouches next to her and puts the back of his hand against her forehead. Her skin is hot and clammy.

“Your hand is cold.” She shoves him off with a disordered movement and her fingers are like ice against his wrist.

“From the storm?” Bjorn guesses, stretching his shoulders out with a deep grimace.

“It could be. Or from hunger.” Athelstan has seen the like before - always in the new novices who confuse their pride for zeal when it comes to fasting. In either case she needs a bed and a meal and her mother, not the cold ground and Athelstan, who cannot even catch a _dead_ rabbit. He drops his head in guilty contrition at that thought, as if the children will read the secret in his face, and peers down at the muddy toes of his shoes.

“Well, it’s a good thing we are almost home, then.” Bjorn says, his face bright as the sunshine outside, but as Athelstan struggles with his one good arm to pull Gyda to her feet - the burning in his muscles reaching across his back and setting off the sharp pain in his right shoulder - he wonders if Bjorn’s confidence is misplaced. Up until now their goal has seemed so distant that he has not considered what they are to do once they reach it. After all, there is still a raging river to cross.

***

All that late morning they walk alongside the ridge in the shivering shadow of the trees. The sky is a pale blue now, washed of colour by the rain, and clouds float across it, fine as thistledown. It is a bland, unthreatening sky, the storm having burned away every remnant of itself, and beneath it, the maples give slow deference to birch - tall and slender, their smooth trunks crusted with grey lichen, their feet pooled about with a bitter-scented air that lies cool in the wet grass.

On their clothes, the mud has dried in dark, heavy patches. It feels gritty - like sand - rubbing at the skin, and already Athelstan dreads the hours he will spend scrubbing it all out of whatever can be kept, neck and shoulders burning over his task. It will be no worse than a long day in the Scriptorium, agonising over all those rows of perfect letters, but now, while his body throbs at every step, it is too tiring to contemplate.

The grass is worn here, trodden down in a thin, meandering line that they follow on a slow descent, and occasionally marked by cloven hoof-prints - deer or goat or pig, Athelstan cannot yet tell apart - where mud rises up to capture them. And from below, the rumble of the river has crept in so slowly that it is a long while before Athelstan realises he has noticed the sound, sussurating up through the tunnel of trees.

Gyda weaves to one side of the path and splashes into a puddle that sits along the bank, swishing her bare feet back and forth in it, stirring up the grassy bottom into floating strings like seaweed. She still carries one of the mushrooms they found beneath a tree an hour past and she picks at it while she tramps through the long puddle, first peeling off the fragrant yellow skin, then breaking off small sections of the cap and sucking at them. The scent of it - like the peach that Athelstan ate once in Paris - is maddening, and Athelstan clutches his own handful to his growling stomach. He is reluctant to eat it - he can manage without, and there is a long way yet to walk, with Gyda’s steps slow and unsteady as they were on the ridge, and the fever in her cheeks a darker, angrier crimson.

“You should put your socks back on,” Bjorn tells her, “you’re already sick.”

She has tucked them through her belt beside the twined remains of Bjorn’s overtunic, where they flap like disembodied feet. She takes three more squelching steps, her shift brushing at her knees, and shakes her head, “I’m not a baby. I feel hot,” and steps out, a little cleaner but for the strands of wet grass curled round the arch of her foot and between her toes.

Bjorn throws her a sharp glance, his eyes narrowed, but says nothing. Instead, he turns his tight-jawed worry on Athelstan, fixing him with a stare above Gyda’s bowed head. “Just eat would you?” he snaps, ducking beneath a branch that transects his side of the path, “or Gyda will get angry again. And you know there is no use arguing with women.”

Above them, the path they walk is mirrored in a river of sky and Athelstan watches the ravens flying south along it, wings swept out wide, forming ragged shadows against the blue. “Another thing that Ragnar says?” he asks, as they drift out of sight.

“He does not need to _say_ it.”

The image of Ragnar being cowed by anyone - even Lagertha - makes Athelstan smile a little and he drops his head, scratching at the itchy lump of an insect bite behind his ear, covering his amusement.

“I hope there is bread at home.” Gyda walks one foot in front of the other, arms outstretched in a game of balance. “ _Fresh_ bread. Fresh, _warm_ bread. With _cheese_.” She closes her eyes and inhales a long breath as if by pure imagination she can conjure it. “What do you want, Bjorn?”

“A whole pig on a spit,” he answers without hesitation. “All crispy.” He steps up onto the bank. For a few strides he towers above Athelstan and takes advantage of it, reaching out and ruffling Athelstan’s hair as he does Frodi’s ears until Athelstan ducks and sidesteps and Bjorn loses his balance, tripping back down onto the path. “Athelstan wants boiled toad and cabbage.”

“Perhaps not the cabbage,” Athelstan says, then takes a moment to think. He scratches at his head again. “I do not mind. Anything is good.”

“You don’t have a favourite meal?” Gyda asks. He shrugs his good shoulder and she frowns, pursing her lips into a tiny circle. “Well… what did you eat in England?”

Athelstan cannot quite smother his laugh - of all the many things that are painful to remember about England for missing them, food is not one of them. “Ah, raw vegetables and bread mostly.”

Bjorn stares at Athelstan for so long that he trips over Frodi’s long, whipping tail and narrowly avoids finding another branch with his face. “That is _all_?”

Even Gyda, who has taken most of his information about life in England in fascinated stride, looks as if she would be quite happy to sail across the sea herself and slit Father Cuthbert’s throat all over again.

Athelstan dips his head, clearing the lump from his throat with a cough. “Largely, yes. We believe in—” he waves a hand, searching for the words in Norse, but he cannot find them, so he slips into the English momentarily, “frugality and fasting.” Gyda rolls the unfamiliar words around on her tongue, tasting them, and Athelstan hesitates, struggling to translate. “That is, eating little and infrequently. For most of the year, there is one meal a day.”

“ _One meal._ ” Bjorn screws up his face in disgust. “And no meat? Are you all trying to starve yourselves to death? No wonder you couldn’t put up a fight. You are all bone and nothing else.” He shakes his head to himself and stomps off ahead, muttering low under his breath. “No sex and no food. What is wrong with you people?”

Athelstan slows his own steps, scrubbing his hand over the back of his neck as if it can wipe away the betraying warmth of his embarrassment. He is becoming less sure every day whether it is this place that is strange, or him in it. He picks his way through a jumble of roots, his feet rasping against wet socks in wet shoes, and turns the mushroom around in his hands, the frilled edge against his palm. When he looks up again, Gyda’s glazed blue eyes are focused on his face.

“Is that why you wouldn’t eat, when you first came?” she asks.

Athelstan winces, swallowing at a phantom sickness in his throat. Every meal was a battle, those first weeks. Each mouthful made him ill deep in the pit of his stomach, a guilty revulsion mingled with grief and loneliness and despair. So many died at Lindisfarne, Cenwulf lay at the bottom of the fjord, and in bloody payment Ragnar gave Athelstan a feast of forbidden food and watched him choke it down with a self-satisfied grin. He may as well have been eating Cenwulf’s rotting flesh. After Ragnar left, with the greater sin of betrayal on top of it all, it was easier not to eat.

He walks on - two paces, three. “I suppose that is part of it. There is much to become accustomed to here.”

“Well you can ‘become accustomed’ to eating to begin with,” Bjorn calls over his shoulder. He stomps on for another few steps, then drifts to an unexpected halt in the middle of the trail. “No one should be here.”

There is a hut sat by the path, a long-eaved, greying rectangle built down into the earth like those of Athelstan’s childhood. It is so alike that he tilts his head, listening, half-expecting a gaggle of dirty children to burst out across the tiny yard - past the sodden fire and the broken garden fence - but everything remains silent and so does Bjorn, stiff and still before the open gate.

Athelstan leans towards Gyda. “Why is—”

“Quiet!” Bjorn hisses. He taps his hand on his thigh and Frodi comes to heel, ears pricked, his head knocking Bjorn’s elbow. Bjorn steps into the yard, kicking at a matt of mint runners that have leaked beneath the fence and across the dirt, cresting upwards in the centre in a wave. He curls one hand into a loose fist, the other he rests on the handle of his sax, fingers poised to release it. He clears his throat. “Is anyone here?” In the distance, a songbird titters a response.

Gyda leans in to Athelstan’s shoulder. “Fastarr died three winters ago,” she whispers, while Bjorn waits for an answer, and she gestures at the thatch of fresh, green nettles. There are eels over the fire too, charred and wrinkled, and when the breeze blows it picks up the smell of oily smoke and a faint rottenness.

“So someone has taken it over.” Athelstan tries not to breathe through his nose, but he can taste the smell on his tongue instead and it lingers with an intolerable sweetness. He scrapes his tongue on his teeth to rid himself of it. “What is strange about that?”

Gyda lifts her eyebrows. “Here?” she says, with a tone of deep disbelief, punctuating the word with a downwards stab of her chin.

Athelstan cannot see what is so strange about ‘here’ either. Beyond the rows of limp, brown garlic scapes in the kitchen garden, the rough grass rolls away down to the river, where the tops of two wooden posts punch up through the foaming water - those the only parts of the pier that remain unsubmerged. It is a fisherman’s hut and a fisherman lives in it.

The silence, however, is unnerving and the door of the hut gapes open onto a darkness cluttered with unmoving shadows. Bjorn grips his sax and glances over his shoulder at Gyda. They swap shrugs.

“He had a brother,” she says, her voice rising into an almost-question and wobbling, unsure.

“In _Rogaland_.”

“Hmm.”

And they both still again. Flies buzz in the silence, flitting about a bucket beside the fire.

Gyda shuffles her feet and the grass squeaks under her heel. “We could just leave.”

“Hmm.” Bjorn taps his forefinger against the sheath of the sax, his face tight and concentrated. Frodi is rigid beside him. Even his wagging tail is high and stiff now, thunking periodically against the fence _. “_ You want him at our backs if we go?”

“Him?” Athelstan says, his frustrated bewilderment making the word louder than he intends, “how do you—?”

“Out here,” Bjorn nods his head at the tiny property, “there is family and there is wolf. Who else would come out here, hoping for something where there is nothing?” He speaks quietly, as if he has not already announced their presence, and in the short distance between them his words turn woollen and muffled.

Athelstan tilts his head, his forehead tightening in a hard frown. “‘Wolf’,” he repeats, fumbling to make sense of it all. Perhaps he misheard the word. “Or ‘neither’?” he tries.

But this only gains him a dismissive shake of Bjorn’s head and a muttered, “Idiot.” Bjorn rolls his shoulders back and steps down through the doorway, disappearing into the shadow inside. There is a crash, metal against metal, and Bjorn cries out a series of nonsensical curses.

Gyda jerks like a caught rat, twisting towards Athelstan then away again, her hands clasping at empty air. Finally, she fumbles for his sleeve and yanks at it, dragging him through the gate.

Athelstan’s shoulder spasms. Pain sweeps over him in a wave of black, and everything dims to sudden night. He catches at her hand, prying at her fingers. “Gyda—” he pleads in a breathless voice.

She releases him to a stumbling halt by the fire in the yard and snatches up a fallen fence post, hefting it by her shoulder like a spear, sharpened end forward. The flat end is termite-ridden, split apart as the pages of a book. “Help me,” she hisses, but it is all Athelstan can do to stay upright, clutching at one leg of the rusty iron fish rack.

Inside the hut, Frodi yelps and whines, shrill enough to cut through Athelstan’s black fog. Then there is a series of rapid, metallic thuds - like a blade hitting wood - and the scuff of feet struggling across a dirt floor.

Athelstan grits his teeth and forces himself straight. He grabs a poker which has been left embedded in the edge of the dead fire, but it slips in his rust-flaked palm, hitting the metal rim of the nearby bucket with a resounding _clang_ , clear as a church bell. A cloud of flies bursts out, their fat bodies pelting his face like hail. He recoils, his fingers flying open of their own accord and dropping everything in a clamour on the ground. He smacks his heel on the stones surrounding the fire and staggers sideways. They are everywhere, crawling over the charred eels in a moving skin of shining green. And where the fish have burst open along the sides, a wriggling mass of maggots oozes out. They form a thick, white blanket in the wound, dripping down from it in a constant stream onto the cold firewood below and wriggling outwards, over the wood, over the stones, over Athelstan’s feet. He recoils again, backing across the yard towards the fence, gagging.

Bjorn pokes his head out of the doorway. He stares at Gyda - her hand knuckle-white on her makeshift weapon, then at Athelstan behind her, coughing into his elbow. “You came to rescue me from fish hooks? You’re a little late, I fought them off myself. And no one is here.”

“They might come back.” Gyda hoists the fence post higher, scraping it across her cheek, cherry-red and sheened with sweat.

“I doubt it.” Bjorn brandishes a whole loaf of bread, which he knocks against the door frame. It thuds. “Hard as a rock. But there might be something we can take. He left everything.”

“Days ago.” Athelstan swallows several times, slowly drowning his sickness. “He left the fish to rot.”

Gyda sighs a long sigh and drops the post. Her legs are shaking, and she slumps onto a stool by the door, tucking her feet back against the clean new wood and resting her chin in her hands. Bjorn taps her on the head with the stale loaf, dodges her half-hearted swipe and goes back inside. “I didn’t know the water was so high.” Her face is squashed up in her hands, wrinkled as a newborn pup and Athelstan cannot decipher her expression, but her voice is flat and tired. “I hope we don’t have go to Uncle Rollo’s for winter.”

Athelstan had not considered that. Sickness rolls up his throat again, though this time it has nothing to do with the maggots that are still crawling across the toes of his shoes. He scrapes them off in the dirt, mashing them flat. “Why not?”

Gyda’s answering shrug bobs her head up and down. “I hate Kattegat.” She twists her hand around and presses the back of it to her hot cheek. “Bjorn likes it, Uncle Rollo always gets him drunk.” She slumps lower on her seat, as if her body is too heavy for her, her eyes half-lidded.

“What did Bjorn mean before? ‘There is family and…’”

“Wolf.” She cringes when she says it, opening her eyes enough to check the trees around them.

Athelstan looks too, and once again there is nothing. “But what does that mean?”

“Athelstan?” Gyda sighs out, eyes slipping shut again. “I think I need to lie down.” And she crumples to the ground.


	14. Chapter 14

“You will be quicker.” Bjorn takes a crunching bite from his apple and leans back against the sleeping bench where Gyda is sprawled, loose-limbed and heavy. She snores.

Athelstan picks up the furs, kicked into a tangle on the floor, and shakes them out one-handed in the doorway. Clouds of dust plume up into the air and drift across the yard, over the rotting eels and Frodi’s sleeping form, laid out in the shade of a willow. Athelstan takes his time over folding them again, clutching one hand atop another, buried within the folds. Down at the ruined pier, the river remains a raging mud-brown, foam-flecked at the banks and tumbling with dirty white water wide across the centre. Athelstan frowns. “I do not like to leave you.”

Bjorn makes a strange half-snort, interrupted by a short choking noise, then coughs. “What could happen?”

“Just an hour ago you were preparing for a fight.” Athelstan turns and leans against the doorframe, half in and half out of the shadow. He raises an eyebrow. It must be a poor approximation of Ragnar’s searching stare because Bjorn’s smirk only widens. Which you have yet to explain.”

“Explain what?” Bjorn throws the apple core in the cold ashes of the hut’s firepit, below the pot filled with the hardened remains of a stew, and examines his sticky palms. He wipes them on his tunic with all the other layers of mess and although Athelstan should long since have ceased caring, he winces.

“’Wolf,’” he says.

“A hairy creature with four legs and a tail. You do not have them in England?”

“None so clever as to thatch a roof and smoke fish.” Athelstan steps back inside and lays the furs back at the end of the bench. It is the only one in the small hut, a short box of packed earth built into one corner and topped with a single, moth-eaten blanket. The opposite side is mostly taken up with fishing nets and baskets and a small workbench, upon which sits a lump of moulding cheese. A single shoe has been left upturned on the earthen floor. Athelstan kicks it out of the way and crosses the room to perch on the barrel of salt-packed herring. “It is a secret?”

“You don’t have to work so hard to understand us, you know. Not everything is a mystery.” Bjorn splays his legs across the floor. “Wolves. Human wolves. Outlaws. You have those, don’t you?”

Gyda stirs - huffing and wrinkling her face into a tight expression - and Athelstan draws breath to call her name, but she flops over onto her stomach and droops again without waking. Her leg slips off the bench and nudges Bjorn in the back of the head. Sliding out of the way, tutting under his breath, he pushes her foot back up and prods it until it stays there.

“You should go,” Bjorn says, resettling himself on the floor by Gyda’s head, her face now covered by sticky clumps of hair, as messy as a sparrow’s nest in a hawthorn hedge, “or you won’t get back before dark.”

Athelstan nods but does not get up. His own small meal lies leaden in his stomach and he can no longer separate the sickness of long hunger from the unease of leaving or the dread of completing his journey. Perhaps it is all part of the same weighted stone. He twines his fingers together. The beds of his fingernails are mud-black, in the creases of the skin across his knuckles he is mottled as a moth. He scratches a thumbnail along his arm, scraping out a light line through the muck. He does not want to go back.

That last night, Ragnar half-banked the fire once the children were abed and the longhouse dimmed into a threatening gloom. Lagertha busied back and forth with long, skirt-rustling strides, gathering the washing into a basket until it was piled high with linens, all sweat-yellow and dirt-grey. At last, she stopped in front of Athelstan - slumped on the bench by the side door - and kicked his ankle. His foot jolted into Ragnar’s, who snorted amusement and kicked it back again. Athelstan reached down and - on the third, grasping attempt - cupped his hand around his stinging bone in a poor attempt at protection.

“You put yours in.” Lagertha hefted the basket, speaking loud and slow with a wide, exaggerated mouth, as if he were stupid.

But perhaps he was. The words trickled through his ale-soaked mind, dropping from sound to thought to understanding as slow as winter sap. Eventually, he managed a nod, his head bobbing uncontrolled atop his neck.

Lagertha’s derisive expression became a scowl, with hooded eyes and pursed lips. “Tomorrow is the big wash. Gyda will show you. And you should wash yourself while you are at it, you stink like a goat in rut.”

Athelstan’s face flamed, the heat creeping up into his hairline and back past his ears. Ragnar laughed a booming laugh and smacked him on the shoulder with the back of a wide hand. Athelstan swayed sideways, gripping his empty cup as if it could save him from falling, and the room swung up and down, side to side like a ship teetering on storm waves.

Time disappeared. Athelstan’s cup was full, empty, full again. He wanted to drown the burning ache of his betrayal, but it grew instead like a monster, gorging itself on Ragnar’s perverted delight. He wanted to throw up. Athelstan clamped his eyes shut and colours burst. The room spun behind his eyelids, faster and faster. No rope at least, to become tangled in. Because he had proved himself a useful tool, had he not? Desperate for friendliness like a kicked dog, and so easily manipulated.

“Tell me of your land,” Ragnar had said. And Athelstan had told.

“Teach me your words,” Ragnar had demanded. And Athelstan had taught.

“Swear me an oath,” Ragnar had asked. And Athelstan had sworn.

“Time for you to go to your bed, Priest. Unless you wish to join us in ours.” Ragnar tugged at his hair, fingers wrapped half round his skull. Ragnar could crush him like a child crushing a snail shell, one crackling crunch and all the slimy parts would ooze out. Athelstan could not hide his grimace but Ragnar only smirked and shoved him off the bench so hard that he staggered, almost falling into the fire. “Bed,” Ragnar said again. His voice carried a gentle amusement, or Athelstan’s hearing was muffled by the ale. Likely the latter. “And try not to forget your oath while you are regretting your headache tomorrow.”

“You are doing it again,” Bjorn says.

Athelstan blinks. His fingers twitch, red and black, worm-like. “Hmm?”

“Thinking too much.”

Athelstan slips on a weak smile that wavers on his lips. “So I have always been told.” By Sigeric, constantly.

“You need to go.”

“Yes, I know.”

Bjorn taps his armring. “I think I can keep us both alive for a few hours. It’s only a fever, and we have food and shelter.”

“Whoever was here before, he thought himself safe too.” Perhaps he came in to pick up a tool, stopped to tip a stone from his shoe, and then… what? He vanished.

“So you will just have to trust me.”

Bjorn is right, but Athelstan still grips the lip of the barrel, anchoring himself there.

“Athelstan.” Bjorn’s voice is sharp and Athelstan blinks again, focusing himself. Bjorn smiles Ragnar’s crooked half-smile. “That’s an order, Priest.”

***

The sunlight is ageing into stale yellow when the eastward turn of the river pulls Athelstan’s path out of steep woods and into meadow. He stumbles three steps into the grass, panting fire into his aching lungs, and drops down in the last of the shade. Beneath his ribs, his muscles burn and Athelstan digs the heel of his hand into his side, pressing down on the pain.

Behind him the final guarding mountains rise from pine-packed foothills into rocky peaks on either side of the river, curved into sharp-edged fangs. Their shape he knows. Night after sleepless night he has traced their lines, cutting them from the sky until they are as familiar as a childhood toy, and wishing himself an escape.

Athelstan bites at a heaving breath. The air whistles in and out between his teeth. He rubs at the subsiding ache in his side, then drops his hand into the grass, combing through the soft-tufted blades. They tickle the webs of his fingers and he twists his wrist and snaps off a stem. The meadows roll away eastward over low hills for a span of a few miles before the land rises again to craggy ridges, coloured ocean blue. Each green hill is tonsured with oak, their domes spotted with wildflowers, a choir full of bowed heads. In his stomach, Athelstan’s fear is a boulder. He swallows around pebbles. Here he is at last, in the place he has long imagined himself, willingly returning to a place of slavery. This choice was made days ago, at the top of another hill, and he is not minded to change it, but even so the near distance to the prayerful brow of this hill seems an impossible chasm and he is not ready to finish the act.

“’Let your “Yes” be “Yes”’, Athelstan.” He rests his arm on his knee, fidgeting his hand in a nervous back-and-forth, and the grass flower sweeps across the horizon, fighting an invisible enemy. Guard and strike and thrust. This game he played with sticks as a child, Bjorn plays with a wooden sword, and Ragnar plays in blood. “You swore an oath. And that is that.” But it is more than that, it is friendship and trust, and Athelstan has been traitor enough.

Breath comes clear at last, deep and clean. Athelstan gets to his feet and steps out into the sun. The meadow grass is tall and close as a winter snowdrift, laid from a thousand strands of gold and he breaks a path through it with shaking legs. Away to his left, a wren follows his progress, flitting from one swaying green tuft to another, then to a red-headed flower that bows low to the grass beneath it. Athelstan counts his crunching steps to the rising scent of baking bread. The earth smells of hot food and warm ale, of his bench and furs and pillow, of stories around the fire at evening time, of laughter and comfort…

… of home.

Athelstan jerks to a dead stop, eyes wide, mouth forming silent words of shock. Home. Imperfect and painful and perilous and yet… He shakes his head, one sharp sideways jolt, a recoil from a focusing blow. “Keep going,” he mutters, the words tangling on an inhaled breath. There is no time to examine it now - how little different this place is, truly, to his parents’ dispassionate neglect, or to being lost in a crowd of other lost boys, trapped behind walls of stone built for men. There are no stone walls here, except the hills themselves, rising around him like the fingers of a grasping hand.

Between the oaks’ verdant branches and across the far distance of the brown river, glimpses of the settlement slip out. A flash of yellow might be gorse or sand or a patch of dazzling sunlight, that line of grey perhaps a shadow, or the rain-dulled boards of Ragnar’s longhouse roof. Even so, in the small spaces left around his weighty fear an unexpected relief blooms, warming as apple wine.

Athelstan blinks back pricking tears. “Stop it,” he tells himself, gulping down a tangle of emotions as knotted as Gyda’s hair. “This is not—” Home, safety, comfort, it is all and none of those things. The wren twitters at him, contemplating him with one bright eye and Athelstan laughs at himself. “Do not tell Bjorn, I will never hear the end of it.”

Finally, above the meadow’s fringe, the far edge of the muddy river slips into full view with the peak of the lone alder marking the shore like a beacon. It makes a squat and ugly shape beside the slender birches, a broad-shouldered, fat-bellied man in a dark cloak.

Athelstan flicks his eyes to the blue sky and utters a brief prayer of thanks. As the words drift away into nothing he almost speaks again - he has so many things to ask, swirling inside his head -but the more he tries to pin them down the faster they spin, blurring into incomprehension. The moment wanes and Athelstan closes his mouth, pressing his lips resolutely together. He does not have the heart, after all, to add more pleas to those he has already cried out in these weeks of empty nights. He does not want to hear that the answer might be ‘No’.

He scrubs the sweat from his forehead, though more trickles down into his ear. He has only to get Ragnar’s attention somehow. They have only to cross the river. He has only to hope that Lagertha will not kill him for allowing all this to happen. All simple tasks. He rolls his eyes at himself since Bjorn is not here to do so.

The river is several furlongs wide here, widening still further before it narrows again and twists out of sight to funnel past the sheepfold. Athelstan cups a hand across the side of his face, blocking out the sun’s glare low from the west and squints for good measure. Gone is the strip of pale yellow shore, swallowed up by the water that foams about the alder’s lower branches. All around it, the mess of debris clutters what once was sand - tree parts and shrubs and a jumble of wooden posts. A faering has been smashed apart against the trees where the tanning racks were, its mast lodged near to upright between them - just another trunk, stripped of branches.

Athelstan grimaces. It is as bad as he suspected, which is worse than he hoped. The pier is mangled as a horse-trampled limb, twisted up and around upon itself, protruding from the water far back between the gorse. Far beyond that, even the flax and barley fields are a marsh.

“Lord, have mercy,” he whispers. All the crops are ruined, all the boats are gone. He rubs at his chest above his heart where an ache is growing. His shoulder throbs but settles as he stills, pressing his hand against his breast. His heartbeat thrums through his palm, fast and unsteady.

The bobbing yellow gorse draws a line eastwards, past what should be the storage hut - also gone - to the end of Ragnar’s longhouse, a post and part of a wall just visible behind the top branches of a huge, uprooted pine. The root ball rests against the gable end. The misshapen ends of the gableboards - the wolfheads - were the first thing Athelstan ever saw of the settlement, looking down from the hillside above at the end of Ragnar’s rope. He shuffles sideways and everything circles, the gableboards emerging into open sight. They are… wrong - too slanted, not slanted enough, both. The shorter board has dropped right down into the water and the shape they draw together against the mossy roof reminds Athelstan of pictures he has made, of Simon carrying Christ’s cross. He blinks and the roof disappears, leaving dappled grey-green oak woods. It takes a moment to put together what he is seeing - it is gone, rafters and beams and all. Everything is gone.

Athelstan exhales a hissing breath. The house is an empty, broken shell made now of a few posts and a small section of the wattle and daub wall that has not yet disintegrated. But the stables, the garden, the chicken coop, all else has vanished.

“No.” It is a small sound, wavering in the warm air. He shakes his head and says again, “No!” as if all this can be undone at a word. He stumbles further along the brow of the hill, crushing his palm against his chest. The far shore twists round, revealing the ruin of the other buildings, all collapsed and crumpled piles of beam and thatch, nothing more than deadwood. The whole settlement is gone, almost wiped from the face of the earth.

All those buildings - set so close to a low shore at the end of the river’s straight run - they must have been hit all at once, the river turned to a high and crushing wave. How could he have imagined it would survive? All those buildings. All those _people_.

That punches the breath out of him and Athelstan doubles, catching himself with a hand on his knee. The old men, the women, the children. Vakr, who cannot run on that malformed leg. Uxi, who cannot run at all. Oh God, oh _God_. Was no one left alive, to even tell Ragnar that his children crossed the river that morning? Was Ragnar left alive? Athelstan squeezes his eyes shut. The river dashes at his heels, its monstrous roar rings in his ears, then Gyda’s abrupt scream. He opens his eyes again. They had time to run only because he was in the water when it changed. If they had waited until they heard the noise of the flood, there would have been no time to get to safety.

Athelstan jerks upright, gulping down air. “Ragnar!” A flock of sparrows takes frighted flight from a nearby bush. “Ragnar!” He waves his right arm, wide and high above his head. He shouts - for minutes or hours he doesn’t know, time turns circular - until his voice rasps from his throat like wood across stone, and he swallows warm blood across it. But all his words fade out to silence lonely and unanswered, washed away by the rumble of the river. It trembles up through the earth and shivers in the hollow of Athelstan’s chest next to his quivering heart. And the far woods remain empty and still.

“Why did you leave?” _Did_ you leave? His thoughts spin and Athelstan shuffles forwards a step, backwards, sideways - his feet matching his mind’s aimless dance. Where is he supposed to go now? “What am I supposed to do?” But the sky makes no reply. “What am I supposed to do?”

But then, above the bubbling crash of the water, little more than a suggestion of a whisper, comes an answering voice.

Athelstan coughs out Ragnar’s name and waves his arm again. Across the water, where the tree-line ends, there is a flash of movement on the hill, a figure dressed in white and brown running downhill - and downriver - towards the sheepfold. “Wait,” Athelstan croaks, and he holds up a hand, gesturing a halt. “Just wait!” He glances eastward again. It cannot be more than a mile, not so far at all if Ragnar will just stay long enough. And Athelstan turns and runs.

He crests the hill in a few short bounds and slips down the far side in a wading-slide, the tall meadow grass catching at his feet and threatening to send him head-first to the bottom. Athelstan chides himself under his breath, panting half-formed reprimands. _Hurry_. He hits the bottom with a splash. The turf sinks into water under his feet. It floods straight down into his shoes and socks, squelching between his toes lukewarm and gritty. A short, splashing crossing of the marshy ground brings him onto the slope of the next hill, and this he follows around, skirting the edge of the slope where the river has formed a lake on the plain. The grass is a sharp stubble on this rock-tumbled slope and Athelstan picks up speed here, his feet landing with wet _pat-pat-pats_ , slipping and sliding inside his shoes. His toes buffet the padding and painful blisters swell up on his heels and under one ankle bone. He runs with his left arm tucked against his chest but pain jolts through it at every step. His whole body is on fire. This is too much, after the last long days. He gasps in hot air through a grimacing mouth. His head spins when he turns it, checking his progress. His breath roars like a wind in his ears. He is only halfway there.

_Do. Not. Stop._

Athelstan bursts into the trees. They catch at his clothing, whip at his face, scratch at his legs. Roots reach out to trip him. The wood is close as stacked firewood, the air hot and wet. The bank snakes and coils with the shape of the river. Which way is he going now? East or west or down or up. His mind is grey, his breath is fire. How long has he been running? There is sky above, stones below. The world tilts.

Athelstan trips down the bank, clattering pebbles across the shrunken shore, and comes to a stumbling halt in the middle, his hands on his knees, heaving. His heartbeat throbs in his ears, a deafening _whoosh-thump_ , and his breath tastes of iron. The river has spilled its banks and on the far side all the wood is white water. It curls in a dozen waterfalls up and over the apple tree branches and the sheepfold - or the empty field where the sheepfold _was_ \- is hemmed with bobbing apples, an unexpected braid of red and green caught up against the slope of the hill behind.

The call comes again, though the river washes all but the high notes of it away. Athelstan has no breath left to call back. He crosses the thin remaining band of pebbles, splashing into the new shallows. The water bubbles up over his shoes, slips beneath them, tugs at his feet. Here it is playful, a child’s hand in his. _Come have a game with me. Come, come._ Further in it will insist, it will _demand_ , yanking as an insolent child at his mother’s skirts. Then it will take, without mercy. There is no hope at all of swimming across.

The figure moves down the slope, a tumbling brown-white between plumes of green. He is quick then slow, picking his way down the rocks where any misstep would mean plummeting into the gnashing water. Finally, he breaks out from the branches at the river’s edge and perches at the edge of a rock, colours resolving into shape and form and face. And Athelstan chokes on a sob and collapses. It’s a goat. Not Ragnar, never Ragnar, Ragnar left days ago when he found his farm destroyed. _Did_ he? Athelstan is on his own.

The animal bawls again, a high note of distress. Just like Uxi, who was in his house when the flood came, who might by a miracle have lived otherwise.

Athelstan drops his head between his knees, gasping. He clamps his hands over his ears, shutting out the sound of Uxi’s screams. “I cannot help you. I cannot help anyone.” His skull is a wasp’s nest, full of droning wings. What is he supposed to do now? Where is he supposed to go? There is no way to cross the river without help and help is in Kattegat, convinced they are already dead.

 _Is_ it?

The water curls up around his ankles, blotting up his trousers from the hem. The goat gives up calling and bites an apple out of the water. Athelstan counts his breaths in and out, in an out. The buzzing fades to a distant hum.

Down the shore on this side, caught against the bank, is a mess of debris. Something there might be useful. There are a few small branches and other deadwood, general household tools, rotting food. And something else, sitting at the edge of the water - a dark, waving shadow, trapped in the net of the ash tree’s exposed roots. Athelstan wades in up to his shins. The water gurgles up, tugging him towards the ash tree. He grabs a handful of the shadow. Clothes, sodden and heavy as lead. He walks backwards with it, dragging it out of the water, and it spreads out huge black wings on the surface of the shallows. It is his habit, washed out of his chest. The chest itself is nowhere in sight.

Athelstan drags it up onto the grassy bank and smooths the wool out into shape. He stops to breathe through the pain in his arm, crouched over a splayed sleeve. He lays a hand on it, drifts his fingers along the seam. It is still intact, if cruelly misshapen by the churning water, felted in places and stretched in others so that it looks like the habit of a hump-backed man. He can never wear it again. His heart pinches but Athelstan shakes it off, there is no time for that either.

He wades back into the water, picking through the things on the surface - a bucket, floating on its side, the handle of an axe taken off for repair, Uxi’s leather ball. Athelstan stops for a while at that one, his chest tightening again, and rubs his thumb along the stitches before he places it back into the water.

Beneath the exposed roots of the ash, wedged under the eroding earth, the heavier things have come to rest - a waterlogged sack of wheat, a small barrel of nails, and his book. Athelstan picks it up and the spine droops backwards, revealing leaves so curled and mangled that they are unrecognisable. Where he can even see the copy it has all run, the illuminations turned to grotesque, snaking creatures. Pages drip into the water. St John’s melted face sinks into the current and begins to sweep away downriver. Athelstan dives after it.

Knee deep in the water, he realises his mistake. His feet are ripped from under him. The sky flashes by above his head. He throws out a hand towards the bank where it smashes against roots and bounces off again. The water drives him, tumbling, against the earth and presses him in place against the bank. With a thundering heart, Athelstan grabs at the ash’s roots with both hands and begins to pull himself, hand over hand as if climbing a ladder, back into the shallows. At last, he gets his feet back under himself, solid on the pebbles beneath the water. He shakes, sodden down to the skin, and his left arm burns from fingers to neck, but he is alive. He grips the next tree root, not trusting his wobbling legs to get back to the shore without aid. And between his hands, submerged between the two spidering roots, a face stares back up at him.

Athelstan startles back, letting go and tripping over his feet - his own, please God let it be his own - and landing in the shallows. Water splashes up in his face and he shakes his head hard, spluttering, wet hair whipping into his eyes. He sits in the water, hands clasped on the pebbles beneath him. His fingers find a divot in the underside of one and he digs his fingertips in, pulling it into his palm. For a moment it fits as if it were moulded to the shape of his hand. Then Athelstan’s fingers spasm and the pebble drops, floating along in the current for several feet before it sinks back to the bottom. Athelstan swipes wet hair out of his eyes. He cannot leave them there, whoever it is.

It is just as awful when searched out as it was by surprise, the face. The eyes are wide open just beneath the surface, giving the illusion of life, but the cheeks are swollen blue, the lips parted beneath the rippling water. Her long hair waves in the lapping current, combed out into a smooth and shining stream. Carefully, Athelstan frees her from her cage of roots and pulls her up the shore. She is so much heavier than he expected and the pebbles scrape at her back.

“I am sorry,” he tells her. Her hair catches on the stones and her head tilts so that she stares at him, her wide-open expression stark and accusing. She is heavy - slippery - and he drops her. Her head bounces off the grass. Her feet are still in the water. “Sorry.” Athelstan tucks his left arm back against his chest and drops down next to her, shivering and burning.

Her eyes stare, filmed with white, up at the sky. There is a bird up there, wheeling circles high against the clouds. Not that Rannveyg can see it now. Her skin is pale and shining, covered in bloodless scrapes. A hunk of flesh is missing from the upper part of one bare foot, showing the bone. A broken spear of gorse is gripped in one frozen fist. She did not die easily. Nor did she die alone - the water has revealed what she would not when she was alive - her belly is rounded beneath her clinging dress. She was with child.

Anger boils up in Athelstan’s chest in a sudden and whelming flood. No wonder God has been silent here. There can be no life, there can be no hope. And Athelstan drops his head into his hands and weeps.


	15. Chapter 15

Afterwards, he takes Rannveyg’s knife. The grip is too short for him and its wrongness in his clumsy fist is a sharp rebuke. Athelstan loosens his fingers and lets it balance across the bumps of his palm. Between the quarter-moon of his thumb and fingertips, the birch handle rests, split across the width by four perfect white marks - the eternally grasped shadows of Rannveyg’s fingers.

“Forgive me,” he tells her again, “but I need something from you.” He waits, kneeling beside her, as if she will wake and give him permission. But her lips, grey as the stones beneath her head, keep their silence, and Athelstan must at last take hold of her skirts and begin cutting.

It is an effort, sawing wool and linen across the blunted edge of the small iron blade. The metal is pitted with age, crudely beaten, and the crooked tip catches on threads of the linen shift, pulling up messy spider webs that Athelstan must stop to untangle, leaning in close to the swollen flesh.

"Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum…" His teeth clatter, ruining words that should be perfect through endless repetition. Rannveyg smells - of stagnant water and rotten pig meat and crushed flowers - and Athelstan turns his head aside in disgust. Though it is not at her, but at himself. What he is doing is a desecration, a sin, and the dark ugliness of it oozes around inside him even as he sheaths the knife and begins ripping small widths across the skirts. Cloth squeaks across his fingers, fist against fist, stripping away her death shroud and uncovering piece by piece the gouged foot, the white ankles, the blue-bruised shin. He dips his head, vision blurring, and his lips taste of salt.

“ _You_ see me, English slave.”

He jerks, looking up at the still mouth, frozen in a tooth-clenched grimace. But he does not hear her now, any more than he truly saw her then. And she was right, he prayed so many times for release, but this is not what he meant. Perhaps he would have done better not to ask at all.

The linen will not tear here. Athelstan slips the knife back out of its sheath. It hangs by his left hip, on her belt. There are deep black markings on the leather where Rannveyg knotted it around her waist, resting now above the place where Ragnar's ewe kicked him. That bruise is larger than a man's fist, less tender now, but still the shining black-green-purple of a starling's feathers. Further towards the ends of the belt, there are new bruises forming in the leather. Rannveyg would have needed a longer belt soon. The timing of that is not something Athelstan has learned.

“But you were not happy. Why were you not happy?”

Rannveyg, of course, will never answer.

Athelstan grips the knife as best he can, blade down in his fist. His ragged fingernails scratch at his palm, his little finger hangs in a precarious position over the lip of the wood, above the heel of the blade. He holds the linen fast about the cutting edge and pulls. “And forgyf us ure gyltas—” And slips. His fist knocks into the cold, dead flesh of Rannveyg’s inner thigh and the blade stabs into her leg with the firm squelch of a butchering blade disjointing a chicken. Athelstan snatches back both hands, the empty one raised with his fingers splayed open in appeal, staring in horror at the ragged line the knife has left. He has split open bloodless flesh right down to the fat, exposing the waxy cord in her knee, all white and glistening.

His stomach heaves and Athelstan twists to one side, retching. “Forgive us our guilts.” The words whistle across his ruined throat. Forgive. But his guilt is still there, in the undignified splay of Rannveyg’s naked legs and that bloodless, condemning line. “Forgive us—” Tears fall again, cutting salted wounds down his face and over his lips. Athelstan blinks them away and still they come. His breath is wet and bubbling. “Stop it!” Athelstan bites his teeth together, glaring at the ground. “Idiot slave, calm yourself.”

Rannveyg is dead and gone, the children are not. And she was a mother in her last months, perhaps she would understand. The water washes Rannveyg’s feet clean, her hair makes a shimmering crown about her frozen face. In her hand she clutches the spear of gorse, its needles threaded into her flesh. Nothing now will make her let go of it.

Athelstan swallows back the burning sickness in his throat. "Forgive me." He speaks in Norse this time, though she is deaf now to any language of the living. But his thumping heart calms and he takes up his task again, making up a pile of wool and linen strips. When he is finished, his eyes red-rimmed and sore, he smooths the remainder of her skirts down around her knees and folds her arms over her body. The broken gorse lies against the small mound of her womb. He should say something, but he does not know what to say. She never believed in his God, and he does not know how to speak to hers. In the end, he shuts her eyes and prays for mercy. From whom, for whom, he is not sure.

***

The walk back to the hut seems somehow longer than it did in the other direction. Frodi is sniffing about in the yard when Athelstan staggers into it and he greets him with a cold nose into Athelstan's open palm. On the river shore, the willow trees droop long branches down to greet the earth. Some caress the river, stained crimson by the setting sun, and their hands drip with blood. Frodi licks at Athelstan's palm, his tongue rough and wet, and tastes the death afterwards with frantic, chattering teeth. Athelstan scratches Frodi under the chin. His fingers are stiff and he _aches_ , from his head to his toes, with an exhaustion that burns every inch of his skin and seeps down through to the marrow of his bones. He could lie down and sleep for the rest of time.

There is light coming from the open doorway - a warm, flickering orange. It dances on the doorframe and the grey twilight shadows gather around it. When it moves, they scatter, up the wood, across the yard, scurrying like mice. Or like children, caught too late from their beds, laughing at the game. Athelstan steps through it, down into the hut. The full light of the fire is a bright thing and he blinks, shuffling around it into the corner against the workbench. He puts a hand on the wooden surface, polished smooth with age…

…and cannot take another step. He slides to the ground where he is, pressed back into the corner, cocooned by the wall on one side, the workbench on the other. He leans his head back into the nook where they meet and the room swirls as if he is drunk or seasick or both.

At length, Bjorn nudges a bowl into his hand, dropped loose palm up on the dirt floor, his fingers curled in at the tips like the legs of a dead spider. The wood is warm and heavy, a split in the grain catching at the side of his thumb, and it tips to the outside with the weight of the spoon handle. He should hold it, but his fingers no longer wish to move so he simply stares at it.

“I am not feeding it to you.” Bjorn steps over him and pours something into a cup, offering it down to him.

Now Athelstan must move. He takes the cup, picks up his bowl, shuffles everything around with slow, careful thought so that he can manage both at once. 

Bjorn squats down beside him, his shoulder brushing Athelstan’s. He weaves his hands together by the fingers, pressing heel against heel until they turn a bright white, and bounces a little on the balls of his feet. “So?”

The bowl begins to burn Athelstan's thigh, but he leaves it there, tucked into the nest of his wrinkled trousers. “How is Gyda?” It sounds like a death-rattle and Bjorn slips him a look of wide-eyed concern. Athelstan coughs and swallows and repeats it, his throat burning. He cannot see much of her over the brightness of the fire - just the angular projection of one bare elbow and a sweaty forehead.

Bjorn nods, frowning harder. “Hot.” He gestures in Athelstan’s direction with his clasped hands. “That is Rannveyg’s belt.”

Athelstan presses his lips shut and stirs the spoon around in the bowl. Fish and vinegar-apple stew? “What is this?” he croaks, twisting a tired smile onto his face.

“Ungrateful.” Bjorn nudges him with his elbow. Athelstan’s arm jerks, knocking the bowl sideways, but the stew sticks to it and hangs there until he rights it. “That is all the food there is. What was I supposed to do with it?”

Not mix it together, Gyda would say, but Athelstan keeps quiet. It is too salty and sour and burned solid at the bottom, but he eats a spoonful anyway, then gulps down the warm and watery ale to wash down the taste. “No crops?”

“A few vegetables, but no barley. Not in the places I could think of. And the grain store is empty. I do not know how he was planning to survive winter.”

Athelstan grimaces. “We cannot stay here, then. Your parents…” he starts, then finds he cannot finish. How is he supposed to ask this?

Bjorn narrows his eyes. “What about them?”

Athelstan stares into his bowl, at the slimy remains of the food, until Bjorn nudges him again and he gathers his courage with a deep, obvious breath. “Could they have been there, when the flood came?”

The firelight dances shadows across Bjorn’s face, and the dusting of freckles appears and fades again at each movement of the light, like glimmering stars. “With the boat in at late afternoon?” he draws the words out, his eyes scrunching up. “They would deal with the cargo, pay their tax of it to Earl Haraldson, share out the rest. That takes a while. They would have stayed the night there. And Father has never taken less than a day and a half over the journey.” He taps Athelstan’s wrist. “Eat.”

But Lagertha has never left her children with a slave before. Athelstan delves in the depths of the stew and retrieves a charred slab of something unrecognisable. “If they started early, or walked more quickly, made better time?” She would have been eager to get home, eager to see what a mess Athelstan made of everything. Ragnar might have been keen to see the outcome of his test. On which, no doubt, Athelstan’s future survival depends.

“It _might_ be possible, I suppose. But I think if they were not there…” and Bjorn waits for Athelstan’s head shake, “then they will be back in Kattegat.” He shrugs a shoulder, rasping it up and down the wall. Bjorn rests his head back, puffs his cheeks up and puffs the air out again. “But you are asking, because everyone else…?” He flits a sidelong look at Athelstan.

Athelstan puts his empty bowl on the floor, lingering over the last touch of it so that he does not have to speak. But he cannot stay in this moment forever. “Every _one_ and every _thing_.”

Beside him, Bjorn freezes and stiffens in slow measure, so that over the length of a few breaths he becomes a stone.

There is a rustle from the sleeping bench. “Everything what?” Gyda slurs. She makes no effort to sit up, only props her head up on one hand, where it wobbles about, unbalanced. Her whole face is red, puffed and shiny. “Athelstan?” Her words are slow and slurred, dripping from a fever-heavy tongue.

Bjorn glances at Athelstan, then down at his interwoven hands. In the quiet, under the crackling fire, his sighing breath is near silent. He untangles himself, claps Athelstan on the shoulder, then uses it to heave himself to his feet and goes back to his previous place by Gyda’s head.

“Bjorn?” she prompts again, once he is settled against her bench.

He leans his head back against hers, his hair brushing her forehead and it must tickle because she swipes a clumsy hand across her face as if ridding herself of a fly. “The farm is gone,” he says.

Gyda searches Athelstan’s face for a long moment, eyes flitting about as if she can find a rebuttal in his chapped lips, his dirty forehead, the scratch on his temple. Then her face crumples, tears dewing. A small sob escapes and is sucked back in. “My goats!” It is a small, plaintive cry. She drops her head to the blanket, hiding her face in the back of Bjorn’s neck.

Bjorn wipes her wet cheeks with his sleeve and threads his fingers through hers, squeezing her hand. She squeezes back and clings on. He leaves his arm there, angled backwards past his head in a way that will make his shoulder ache soon enough, the bone balancing across the thin wooden edge of the bench.

“There was one goat alive, at least,” and Athelstan tells about the one he saw, picking the bobbing apples from the water, and that gets a faint smile through the tears.

“And the sheep on the heft.” Bjorn rubs his face, yawning. It is full dark outside now and the air is weighted with sleep.

Athelstan blinks back, long and slow. “Will your parents come to get them, do you think?”

“And put them where? Uncle Rollo does not have a field.”

"But they would not want to lose them, they are valuable." And Rannveyg's kin, Authny and Vakr's, they would want to claim theirs before winter also. And then they will see the signs he left, in Rannveyg's body, in his habit - the sleeve pointing upriver - in the cloth banners leading a trail through the trees. "I could go down every day. Wait." Just to make sure. Just to be _sure_.

Bjorn scoffs, but it’s a tired noise with no real derision in it. He rubs his thumb over Gyda’s knuckles, back and forth, back and forth. “In the summer rains? You would wash away.”

Gyda makes a protesting sound, too slurred to make out. Her eyes are slipping shut again.

“ _I_ could go,” Bjorn says, “but I would rather not stay here for long. The food won’t last more than a few weeks and we don’t know when or if they’ll come back. Can we not cross?”

Athelstan shakes his head, lips folded in a grim line. “It is white water all the way by the sheepfold. Are there any fording places further down? A bridge? Another settlement?”

“Nothing but cliff on that side. There are no other people around that I know of. There is nothing here. Why do you think Father goes to England?” Bjorn taps his fingers on his knee, matching the trill of a late bird in the trees outside. “Except…” and Bjorn breaks into a slow grin, stretching wide as the river itself, “…there _is_ Floki.”

***

In Athelstan’s dreams that night, Eldwyn’s sickroom is hot, full of the glow of the warming fire.

Athelstan sits on the floor by the merchant’s cot, cross-legged, his bare feet tucked into the folds of his knees. He wriggles his toes, pulls off the split end of one big toenail and discards it in the dust beneath. The man’s face is a red-cloaked beetle, his sunken eyes the spots. Athelstan tugs at the neck of his tunic - twisted out of shape where Sigeric has been yanking again - and leans his chin on the edge of the cot. Face to face, the man’s hot breath ruffles his hair.

“You’re not afraid, boy?”

He doesn’t jump, he knew Eldwyn was there. Athelstan frowns and rubs at his chin where he banged it on the cot’s wooden frame. He shakes his head and his hair flicks into his eyes. Sigeric wants to have it cut, but only Mother… Athelstan gulps, big and noisy and shameful. “People die.”

Eldwyn stares at him long and hard, scratching at his grey-bearded chin. The sound rasps around the room like a carpenter’s lathe. “He’s not dying yet.”

“Will he be, though? Later?” Just like— _Shut up!_ He glares at the man’s nose. It is fat and dimpled and there is a hair curling out of one nostril. “What’s wrong with him, anyway?”

“A fever.”

Also like— “I knew _that_.” Athelstan prods the ugly nose. The man snuffles in his fever-sleep like a big, stupid bear and rolls over, revealing a damp yellow stain on his pillow. The tip of Athelstan’s finger burns from the brief contact. The man’s body is Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery oven. “So what’ll happen to him? What happens?”

“If I can’t help him, at the least his brain will cook inside his skull, like a _boudin noir_.”

“A what?”

“A sausage, boy. Like a sausage in a pot.”

“Oh.” He rests his chin on the cot again. Eldwyn’s silent presence hovers at the far corner until, at some point, Athelstan blinks and he is gone.

***

He awakes with a jolt at the first tones of grey dawn light. He rolls onto his back, stretching out the arcs of pain in his shoulder and wrist. The rest have faded into a dull ache, less a beating now than a constant low burn, as of seized muscles from a long, cold winter. He is becoming too old for sleeping on the ground.

Gradually, Bjorn’s shape solidifies, huge-bellied, standing at the bottom of the sleeping bench. He kicks Athelstan’s foot again.

“Get up. I need the floor.” His voice carries the particular hoarseness of someone trying to be quiet without whispering. His arms are full. Athelstan sits and curls up small in the corner, slotting himself against the workbench as before, and Bjorn sheds his belly in the abandoned space. The dropped items clink and rustle and thud. Bjorn turns back to the open storage chest and continues rummaging through it.

“What are you doing?”

If Bjorn rolls his eyes at the stupid question, it is too dim to see it. “Getting an early start.”

But Athelstan’s mind is slow and swimming. He scrubs at his face with the heels of his hands. “At what?” he yawns. “Wait,” he interrupts Bjorn’s breath, hitched in readiness to speak, “Floki.”

“I will be a few days.” Bjorn pulls out a lump of leather and drops it with the other things. “No more than a week. Look around for a cloak pin, would you? I cannot find one.”

Athelstan gets to his feet, fighting to unfold every stiff muscle. He is an old hinge, in need of oiling. He looks about the few surfaces, shuffling jars around on the shelf above the workbench - he yawns again, fit to split his jaw off - and feeling about in the cobwebbed corners. “We have not talked about this,” he says over his shoulder.

“ _I_ did. You fell asleep before you could argue with me.”

“Then I will simply have to argue with you now.”

One jar rattles. Inside there is an assortment of useless items, the kind a child might collect - bone needles with blunted tips, chipped stone loom weights, a seashell. There is also a wooden comb with one tooth snapped off. Athelstan takes that with a wide smile.

“You are exhausted.”

Athelstan laughs, though he keeps the noise soft. "I am well-practised with exhaustion."

Bjorn makes a face, twisted and sour as if he has taken an unexpected bite of bitter herbs. "I can do my share. I want to do my share. There is no point in _this_ otherwise.” And he shakes his forearm in the air. His armring glints in the low light from the doorway.

Athelstan turns and leans back against the workbench, suppressing the sigh of relief at taking some weight from his feet. He twists the comb around in his hand, searching for the right words and Bjorn waits with unusual patience, his arms loosely crossed. 

"I know," he says, slow while his thoughts are still forming, "but it has never been about that, it—" The comb scratches his palm. He tightens his hand around it, pressing the teeth into his flesh. "You do not use a sword to chop kindling, you do not use silk as a cheesecloth." He shrugs, a heavy, resigned drop of his shoulders. If Bjorn dies, Ragnar loses his son. If he dies, he takes with him all knowledge of how to rescue themselves and how to survive until that is possible. Athelstan on the other hand…

“And you are the cheesecloth here?”

“You are too important,” he says, ignoring Bjorn’s mocking note, “I am dispensable.”

Bjorn is silent. He shuts the lid of the chest and slumps down onto it. “Not to us.” He looks up at Athelstan with half-lidded eyes. Outside, the light brightens again.

“I do not know much about what being a man is, here.” And perhaps Ragnar would laugh at him, perhaps Bjorn will. “But I was taught that it means making the right decision, no matter what it costs you.”

Bjorn chews at nothing, clacking his teeth against each other, deep in thought.

Then Gyda stirs again with a sudden breath, breaking the quiet. She rearranges her limbs in a spider’s sprawl, one knee folded up against the wall, an arm hanging from the bench.

“Gyda,” Athelstan crosses the room and crouches down in front of her, “see what I found.” He holds up the comb, waggling it in his fingers.

She blinks her eyes open, then immediately screws them shut again. "Ow!" It is less a whine than a hiss, forced out against a sucked-in breath.

Athelstan glances at Bjorn, tense on his seat, and back again. He brushes the hair from her face. “What is it?” Her head is hot as a fire-baked stone. “Bjorn?”

“She has had a headache all night. And the fever is worse.”

“I can tell. Why did you not wake me?”

“Ragnarok would not have woken you. And what could you have done, anyway?”

Athelstan slumps. What indeed? All his help has been useless so far.

Bjorn stares at him, back across his own shoulder, and gives a small shrug, jolting his own chin. “I made her drink, but I think she needs medicine now, and there is nothing here.”

Lightning sparks up through Athelstan’s spine and into his lungs. “She drank!”

“That’s what I just said.”

“No.” Athelstan shakes his head. “She swallowed the river water.”

“And? So did you.”

“I threw it up again,” he says, louder and sterner than he means to. “She _drank_ it. Like my family.” Bjorn flinches and Athelstan bites his teeth together until it hurts. There is nothing and no one for days in any direction. They may as well be in the middle of the sea. He scrubs at his sleep-blurred eyes. “You can tell me how to find Floki?”

There is a tense pause, Bjorn tightening his jaw to argue again, then he sighs and pushes himself to his feet. “Let me pack first.”

"Tell me a story, Athelstan? While you wait." Gyda cracks one eye open, squinting even in the low light that is slowly turning pale as a wild rose. She seems only half-aware as if she is one step into a different place already.

Athelstan swallows down his shivering fear and twitches a smile. “Somehow it is always my turn.” He wiggles the comb again, questioning, and she gives a short nod.

“But I do not think I can sit up.”

“You should try to be less difficult in future.”

She smiles a little and shuffles back to make space for him. The small movement must hurt her because she hisses and presses her fingers into her temple. “Mmmhmm.”

Athelstan perches on the edge of the sleeping bench and starts teasing out the snarls in her hair with the unbroken end of the comb. Words roll off his tongue, verse by verse in rote and pattern, though he cannot say what story he is telling. Gyda lies still, her face wrinkled up with pain. After a while, Athelstan hunched over a particularly fearsome tangle, plucking at it with the end of the comb, a bowl of soapy water appears beside him.

Bjorn lingers at his elbow, shuffling an awkward half-step. “You should take Frodi.”

Athelstan stops combing. “No. Bjorn—”

“You will take him.”

“You two will need him here. What if there are wolves?” And he rolls his eyes at himself to save Bjorn doing it. “Human _or_ animal.”

"For the last time, I am a man, and I can take care of things by myself. And one man to another, you are being an idiot." Bjorn gives Athelstan a scathing look that Gyda would be proud of. "We have four walls and a roof. You're the one who will wake up to find a bear chewing your leg off or a lynx gutting you if you don't have protection. You are taking Frodi." Bjorn drops something in his lap. "And this."

It’s a sax, housed in a simple leather sheath. “You are giving me a weapon?” He raises his hands away from it out of instinct. It looks like Ragnar’s, a crude and necessary thing, benign in its slumber, until it is pressed against your own throat.

Bjorn’s face tightens. He hunches his shoulders, leaning towards Athelstan, and there is a jerk of his head that might be an aborted check of his surroundings. “Get rid of it before you get to Floki,” he says, his words ever so slightly hushed as if, days and miles away, someone might hear their secret.

Athelstan doesn't like to imagine the things Floki might do to him for carrying a weapon. He puts the comb down and, with an embarrassing hesitation, picks up the sax instead. He itches to slip the blade out and look at the gleaming metal, in the way of ripping the scab from a painful wound. Instead, he presses it in and holds it there, his grip tense enough that the cross-stitching hurts his fingers.

Bjorn clears his throat and Athelstan commits to a jerky nod, putting the sax to one side in a hurried, startled movement.

“Though I doubt you could fight off a frightened rabbit.”

“With any luck, I shall not have to find out.” And he picks up the comb again.

When Gyda’s hair is smooth and shiny, as well as he can get it, Athelstan plaits it up. His neck and shoulder are stiff with pain and he flexes his hand to unseize his fingers before he can pick up the bowl of water - dirty grey now, filled with floating debris like a miniature flooded river.

Gyda catches his arm, squinting her eyes open, her fingers digging in between his muscles. “Be careful.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t get your leg chewed off by a bear.”

“I will do my best in that regard.” He waits for her to let go, but she tightens her hand. The flesh of his arm moulds up between her fingers as easily as wet clay.

“You should have this, too.” Now she lets go and tugs at the leather cord around her neck, guiding it up and over her head. It catches around her plait - which is soaking cold water into the shoulder of her shift - and her hands are shaking too much to free it. Athelstan sets the bowl down again and helps her to untangle it. He expects it to be a little silver amulet of some kind - like those he has seen others wearing in Kattegat, of Thor’s hammer or such like - or a smaller copy of one of Lagertha’s beaded necklaces. But it is gold and an unusually large size for such a small wearer.

He picks it up, swiping his thumb over it to rub off dirt and dust. A pair of eyes stare back, or rather, a pair of empty sockets where two small jewels used to rest. “A wolf?”

“Father brought it home from raiding last summer. He said it gives courage, so I would not worry about him when he went away again.” Gyda gives a crooked smile, lowering her eyes to the blanket. She plucks at it with finger and thumb. “It doesn’t really work like that, he was just trying to make me feel better. But I think if you wear it, it will give _you_ courage. Then I won’t worry so much about you, out there all alone with no one to look after you.”

“I will have Frodi.” Athelstan strokes his thumb over the wolf’s face again. It is delicately etched, line upon line of tufted fur sweeping out from the eyes, worn down at the sides.

“But you won’t have us.”

“I am supposed to worry about _you_.”

“Will you take it? I know your God does not like ours.”

Father Cuthbert would disapprove. Athelstan pictures his lean and age-spotted face, the resigned irritation that permanently wrinkled his balding pate, at least where Athelstan was concerned. But Father Cuthbert is not here, he has taken his disapproval to the grave, so Athelstan slips the cord over his head and tucks the amulet into his tunic. It bumps against his pewter cross, just as heavy, somehow more substantial. “There,” he says, tugging the end of Gyda’s hair. “Now there is nothing to worry about.”


	16. Chapter 16

Athelstan slips on the scree-covered slope and goes down again, his left hip smashing into the ground. The blow is immense, like being hit by a charging ram, and his breath is knocked out of him in a sharp grunt. Then he is sliding, carried down the steep foothills on the scattering crest of a rocky wave. The world slips past in white and grey. He throws his hands out and grapples at the earth, heart galloping, clawing fingers into it for purchase like a terrified cat, his feet and his pack scraping a trail through the loose stones. He hits an old root and the impact jolts through his knees but it does not slow him, scraping across his stomach and punching up beneath his lowest ribs and squeezing his breath out of him again. Lights flash across his vision. Finally, he comes to a slow, grating halt. The stones continue in a rippling wave beneath him, down the slope and into the river. Between the valley cliffs, the resultant splash echoes on.

Athelstan lays his head down against the earth and breathes in dust. His leg stings from hip to knee. He is only past the ruins of the settlement by a few hours and already he must have scraped half his skin off on these foothills. If Ragnar needs a trail to follow, Athelstan has left one in blood. Behind him, more stones slither down the slope and Frodi noses at the back of his neck with a cold, wet prod.

“Yes, I know,” Athelstan says, and coughs up several mouthfuls of slimy dust, “I am moving.” He unfolds his sore limbs and drags himself back onto his feet. Standing, his pack hangs heavy as a boulder, and he allows himself a grunt at the weight. Gyda is not here to be concerned at his tiredness, Bjorn is not here to make fun of him for admitting to it. Frodi merely stands at his side and leans his head against Athelstan’s hip. It’s a brief moment of reassuring touch, then it is gone again.

It is only mid-morning and the sun is the mixed yellow of a cowslip, peeking out over the cliff above. Athelstan rubs at his burning shoulders and stretches his neck one way and the other but the crick he woke up with is a tightly-sewn seam - the muscles forming a stiff line below one ear. Frodi butts the back of his knee.

“Yes, yes. Don’t nag.” Athelstan rests his left hand against the slope, dusting himself down with the other, though it is so caked with dust itself the effort is entirely fruitless. He is painted in white and dirt shows through black in the cracks of his palm.

Ahead, a small stand of pine trees huddles at the water’s edge. There are a few others, dotted about the rocky lower slopes, the frightened survivors of some apocalypse. Athelstan squints, eyes burning from the glare of sunlit stones, and continues his limping traverse. Frodi patters behind, sneezing out dust in huffing barks.

A tumbled wall of rocks leans against the windward trees, craggy white pieces of mountain as high as Athelstan's waist. Athelstan limps into their shadow and runs his hand along the broken edge of one, still sharp. Above, where cliff meets sky, the place they fell from is clearly visible - a chip in a tooth, bordered by cracked rock. In the lea of the rockslide, there are fallen branches, crushed and broken, the pulp of the wood still green with life. Athelstan prods one over with his foot and a family of woodlice, legs waving in the air, roll themselves over and scatter from the hollow. He rolls it back again and it thumps into place.

Athelstan grimaces up at the damaged cliff. "We had best be past all this by sunset." Beneath the trees, the air carries an eerie hush - a hungry, eager silence - and it soaks up the small sound of his voice, leaving a quiet that is undisturbed by anything other than the constant song of the river. He heads down through the little wood, crunching through needles and across stray stones, padding across packed earth, and the trees - slanted towards the slope - seem to lean into the noise, bowing their heads together in secret conference above him.

Pushing through their final branches, he finds that the slope he has been walking along ends in water. This is not the river itself but a large pool, bulging out of the main flow like a cancer and carving an irregular arc through what would be Athelstan's path at the foot of the saw-toothed cliff. Instead, the sheer wall on his left cuts into the water, the white rock painted down the length of its face with polished streaks of copper and tarnished bronze, marking the path where a waterfall sometimes flows, though it is dry as old bones now. Against its moon-bright surface, the footing of water sits the pure black of a midnight sky, like the pool at the settlement. 

Athelstan crouches at the edge and plays his hand across the surface. It’s cold as a mountain spring too, as if light and warmth both have been sucked away by the gloom. His fingers emerge with the usual blush of flesh though and he dips his hands in again, scrubbing them together. They disappear into the black, but when he lifts them again water drips back as clear as sparkling diamonds. He turns his hands over, rubbing his fingertips. When was the last time he was properly clean? Before his several dips in the gritty flood water, certainly.

Athelstan swallows a dry mouthful, his tongue rasping across his parched mouth. When was the last time he had a proper drink? He untangles the cord of Bjorn’s leather bottle from the sax’s sheath at his belly and pulls it off over his head. The contents are warm and stale, tasting of dust and skin, and dirt crunches between his teeth. He spits out his mouthful, pours the rest out on the ground and refills the bottle from the pool. He drains it twice before he is ready to stop it up again and hang it back over his shoulder. Athelstan wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. His face is scratchy, the bristles of a growing beard patchy on his cheeks and he scrapes hard at it with his fingernails, as if he can dig it out. He has never before been anything other than clean-shaven and neat, now he is straggly-headed as a beggar and his face has the unkempt growth of a stranger.

He could swim across and rid himself of the dust of his travels for a while, become a little more like himself, but the pack would get wet and his food ruined. He tugs the left strap away from his tender shoulder. Besides that, the flat calm of the pool is troubling, like a sudden hush in a forest full of wittering birds, an abrupt peace that tastes of lurking death. Athelstan rolls his sleeve up to his elbow and plunges his arm back down into the darkness of the water. The inky black cuts it off, numbing his hand so that his fingers feel heavy and fat - wrapped in layers of frozen wool - and something flickers down there, a shadow within the shadow. Athelstan stills himself. There again is a suggestion of yellow-green skin and a patch of wide, smooth belly as big as his hand at full span. This is a land of monsters, of huldra and fae and twisted, gruesome things that Gyda whispers of in the dark corners of the house at night only after checking that the doors are firmly shut and bolted. He leans over further, squinting down into the black, and wriggles his fingers again. Beside him, Frodi laps at the water with his bright red tongue, his tail thumping against Athelstan’s pack in a rhythm that sends jolts of pain through his shoulder.

“‘In the river Nile they say that there are crocodiles,’” he says, though Frodi ignores his strange, Latin ramblings, “’beasts of no mean size, which stretch themselves out in the heat of the sun on the banks, and are greedy for humanki—'" The surface of the pool ripples, silken skin sweeps across the back of his hand and Athelstan flinches his arm out of the water, rolling backwards on his heels. He catches his breath with a laugh, pressing a hand to his thumping chest. "Probably just a pike." Yet on the other side of the pool, the bank is marred by a long, shallow scrape. _Some_ large creature has dragged itself up out of the water there. He taps his fingers against his knee, one at a time. He still counts five. “We cannot go through and there is no going around. What do you think, Frodi?”

In answer, Frodi yawns, unfurling his tongue. He sits down with a thump directly on top of Athelstan’s foot.

“That is unhelpful.” Athelstan grabs the nearest tree trunk and tugs himself free, falling back and knocking his elbow. A sharp numbness jolts between the bones and he makes a pained exhalation and curls his arm against his stomach, reaching his left hand around to grab at the offending object. His fingers wrap around the head of the wood axe Bjorn found. He chuckles, a little breathless. “I forgot about this. You think too much, Athelstan, and yet you do not think enough.”

He slips the pack off and gets up, stepping backwards a few paces. Pine trees grow straight and strong and _tall_. These are spindly examples, half-starved by the dry and rocky soil, but there is one— He yanks the axe out and grips it by the haft, letting it swing at his knee on its own weight. It slips by increments through his fingers until just _there_ it changes, no longer a lump of wood and metal, but an extension of his arm. “Over it is.”

There were no pines around their cramped hut in Northumbria. Athelstan sat high in the big elm tree just beyond the edge of the yard, where wood turned to forest thicket, sucking at the last hunk of fire-blackened bread crust stolen from the table. It was ashy-sweet and bark-bitter, melting to a few soggy mouthfuls, but better than the endless rumbling of his empty stomach. He wiggled his bare toes outwards, resettling his feet across the wrinkled bark, scrunching them around the curve of the branch as if he was one of the little red squirrels that pattered overhead. The branches made a woven nest around him, between him and the sky, him and the earth. In summer they blossomed with seeds like butterfly wings and Athelstan would eat them by the handful, bursting into sweet dewdrops under his tongue. Now there was only an ant, sluggish on its way to bed, tickling across Athelstan's bluing toes. 

Athelstan stuffed the last piece of bread into his cheek and held it there with his tongue. He squashed his hands into his armpits, huddled small and tight. He was a squirrel in a nest, brave against the winter frost that coated the few drooping brown leaves and crackled beneath his father’s feet as he worked below, pollarding the hazel.

In all of Athelstan's memories, he is a figure made of barren winter branches - all hard, sharp angles, his face blurred white as a snowy landscape - blowing back and forth in a storm entirely his. _Thunk, thunk, thunk._ Given long enough, every rhythm is absorbed, even when all else is forgotten.

When Athelstan swings, he is the echo of his father's bones. The first blow leaves a clean wound, cut through sour bark and into white flesh. Athelstan closes his mouth and sucks down the taste of charred bread. Sap pools into the cut and pours down. Athelstan counts the rhythm of the axe - hacking out one splintered wedge, then another. When it is ready, the tree goes down with one strong heave and a thunderous crack, branches shivering in the air like grasping arms. It falls in shuddering jerks, scraping against the trees beside, its limbs snapping and tearing. The sleepy quiet fills with the cracking of it, loud as river ice at the early summer melting. Twigs and needles snap off and spray outwards and Athelstan shields his face from its pelting rain.

Then, with a slippery hiss as of sliding snow, the tree comes free of its companions and smashes down onto the opposite bank, raising a cloud of white dust. The trunk bends right across the middle, the whole length of it flexing down then up as if it is no stronger than a piece of parchment. The larger movements still first, then the branches shiver into silence and everything quietens. Through the haze of dust, the sun pales.

Athelstan coughs long and hard, thumping his fist against the rattling hollow of his chest, until the dust settles down again and his shoulder throbs a deep and aching melody up through his neck. With his face still stuffed into his elbow, he shoves the fallen trunk with his foot. It rocks a little but settles again, held in place by the other trees, the stakes to this over-sized weaver. It has rolled heavy-side down, the larger branches now underwater or spread out to the side, but there are enough he still needs rid of if he hopes to cross. He has been nearly twenty winters away from the woods, a long time for bones to grow and forget the ease of childhood movement, but when he steps up onto it - though he is awkward and stiff in his balancing - the tree thrums, through his veins and up into his fingertips, an echo of an echo.

***

His feet are unfeeling stumps. Sitting astride the trunk, his legs in the frozen water, Athelstan rolls his shoulders, working out the ache that spreads from neck to hips and shoulder blade to shoulder blade in a cross of pain. The sun has fully bloomed above the cliff now. The surface of the pool shines back a picture of it, wreathed in bristling green needles of the tree’s wavering branches. It seems such a small distance, the arc it must travel between the valley walls, and then another day is gone. Another day of Gyda’s boiling fever, unless some miracle cure has taken place. Athelstan shrugs off the impatient itch growing between his shoulders, the urge to _just go_. It slips back but does not disappear, crawling across his skin like a fly. And the sun examines itself in its mirror and drifts on.

One last branch, and then the way is free. He grips the axe tightly, settling sweating fingers around the wooden haft - there is no Elisha here to perform a miracle retrieval - aims the glinting axehead, raises his arm and swings. His hand slips. The haft slides through his fingers - _do not drop it!_ \- and Athelstan stiffens, clutching at it, curling over by instinct as though to catch it into himself. His muscles carry the movement through, the axe arcs wide of the branch, skinning off leaves and twigs on its new line down towards the centre of his body. He has time only for the momentary shock, a wash of cold horror at his deadly mistake. He shuts his eyes, bites his teeth together and waits for the pain.

It is a hard, jerking stop when it comes. The axe punches into his stomach and he falls forward over it. Ice sweeps through him from his gut outwards and he gasps, swallowing down bile in large, burning gulps. He presses his left hand into the trunk in front of him, scratching at the bark with his fingernails. His fingers shake. There will be blood. There will be so much blood. There is no pain yet, only the pulsing, promising waves of a coming agony and a deep, gut-churning pressure that makes him cough, jolting the pressing weight of the axe in his stomach.

Athelstan doubles further, gasping breaths of heavy panic. The loose folds of Ragnar’s old tunic drip down over the wound. Athelstan’s right hand is still gripped around the axe’s haft, the heel digging in beneath his own ribs, covered in a sticky warmth. He swallows and tries to relax but his muscles knit tighter. In the water, Athelstan’s terrified reflection stares back up at him, encircled by a frizz of frantic curls, except that one eye is a golden wolf. Gyda’s amulet dangles just above the surface of the pool.

He grits his teeth. He cannot stay here forever. “Courage,” he spits at himself, “you promised… you would have courage,” and he pushes himself upright an inch before he can change his mind. There is no awful sucking noise. The pressure releases a little. He draws an easier breath.

He lets go of the axe, lays his trembling hand against his stomach, probing, pulling and pressing the tunic folds out of the way. The upper half of the axehead is embedded in the trunk of the tree, the exposed half of the cutting edge of the blade pressing against his inner thigh, high at the juncture between right leg and hip. The axe handle sticks up like a spear, jabbed up into his stomach. He winded himself on it - a hard blow, another bruise - that is all. Athelstan jerks the axe free of the wood and when it comes it tugs at the threads of his trousers. Another inch and all his blood would be in the river after all. One small mistake and he dooms them all.

Athelstan rests the axe across the trunk of the tree, pressing his hands down on it and shutting his eyes. The bright sun draws patterns, flickering as firelight on his eyelids. The pine smells of smoke, the water echoes, the metal of the axe is cold against his skin. But he is alive.

The branch comes off on the next attempt, dropping into the river where it is picked up by the current and swept away downstream, and Athelstan clambers through the gap and onto the bank, pulling himself with shaking hands, his legs unmanageable blocks of ice, raining water down onto the earth. He will go back for his things, for Frodi, in a moment, in just a moment. Right now he sinks to the ground, leaning back onto the bare top of the tree. Inside his ice-soaked socks, he thinks he wriggles his toes, though he cannot feel them. Between his feet, the dirt of the bank is disturbed. He is sitting on the animal scrape. Athelstan glances at the still water and shuffles backwards, feet squelching, up the bank. A wide scratched path of mud mars the slope, partly dried but still darker than rest of the earth. It is spotted with animal tracks, mostly smudged, or layered one over another in the creature's scramble out of the water. One stands out clear though, pressed in deeply right at the water margin. This is no crocodile, this has four clawed toes and a wide pad and is distinctly dog-like, only much, much larger.

Athelstan leans over and lays his hand on it, and his palm is swallowed inside the impression. He swallows. “It seems we have a wolf for company.”


	17. Chapter 17

“The Ram’s Horns.” Athelstan blinks up at the looming mountain, a black shadow in the twilit sky. He stretches his feet out beside the fire and slouches back against his pack, wriggling until the lumps give in to the pressure of his shoulders. The fire licks warmth up from his soles to his toes and he sighs out a small breath.

All that afternoon and into early evening, the cliffs grew upwards and blossomed into true mountains. At first, the peaks were a simple line of jagged teeth - the lower half of a jaw embedded into the foothills - but closer, they have stretched apart from each other and at the leading edge the two tallest summits strike up in sharp points, curved into the wind.

“The pass goes between the horns,” Bjorn said. He sketched them on the floor of the hut too, in crude lines, his forehead ploughed deep and his tongue peeking out between his teeth.

“So I look for a mountain shaped like a dead spider?” Athelstan asked and Bjorn prodded him in the neck with the twig he was using to draw.

Athelstan scratches at the mark it made, just above his collar-bone, and swats away a fluttering moth. The Ram’s Horns themselves are bare black rock, patterned with ominous shadow, but there are patches of snow below them, gliding down the ram’s shoulders where the slopes are softer. It catches fire in the last flare of the setting sun - Abraham’s sacrifice - while the rock falls away into a mangled assortment of forest and cliff, plummeting down towards him. There must be any number of paths up, if only he knew them, and any number of ways to get lost.

Frodi turns three tight circles before the fire and flops down at Athelstan’s hip, pressing his long body into Athelstan’s leg. Beneath his rough coat, Frodi’s muscles are solid as a wall and quivering, his ears perked round towards the trees ahead. The woods here are all aspen, long-limbed youths in comparison to the stolid pines of the upper slopes. They spring up in bunches from the loamy bank, their branches knotted together, spilling in laughing groups right down to the water. Already they are slipping into the evening shadow beyond the firelight, a tangle of line and darkness, spiderweb upon spiderweb fading into black. But Frodi watches.

“Our friend the wolf?” Athelstan’s voice is softer than the fire’s crackling but Frodi twitches at the word, one ear swivelling around and then back again. He grumps deep in his throat, a gruff, threatening _hmmph_. In the trees, shadow shifts against shadow. Is that a paw, or a stone? A sleek back stalking in the undergrowth, or a twisting line of ivy caught by the flickering light?

Athelstan huffs out his unease and settles back further, propping his head up with his arm. “It is only an old scent. It must be long gone by now, looking for food.” Wolves are not bears, they do not stay where people are. And in any case… “Unless it is looking for Floki, too, we will be safe enough on the mountain.” He pauses, quirking his lips in and out of a frown. “Or safe from wolves at least.” This is far from the rolling green woods of home, this land of tangled waterways and fortresses of towering rock. In the arc of sky above, the sun slips away and the stars glide out. Tomorrow, they will walk among them, up on top of the world, higher than Athelstan has ever been. And after that, all depends on Floki, the madman.

Athelstan smooths his hand across the woollen cloak beneath him, feeling out the bumps of earth beneath it. “Floki,” he breathes out, and taps his teeth together, lost between words. What is he to say, when they find him? What can be said, to someone who will not listen?

“He is Father’s good friend,” Bjorn insisted, dragging his twig through the hut’s dusty floor, shaping the mountain in the dirt. “He will help us.” In his wide-eyed concentration, cheeks reddened by the warmth of the fire, Bjorn looked child-like again.

Athelstan did not mention Floki’s utter loathing of him. He swallows. His head may be the next Floki mounts on a spade. “Perhaps I should have let Bjorn come,” he murmurs, then shakes his head at his own suggestion. Frodi thumps his tail and it is Athelstan’s turn to twitch, knocked from his thoughts. “Easy for you to say. Floki will not have _your_ head off on sight. I think I might rather have the wolf.” A low, half-hearted growl rumbles through Frodi’s chest and up Athelstan’s left side, then Frodi’s ears droop sideways and he settles his head down between his front paws. And the stars swirl in the blackened sky, the twisting shapes of an adder, the sharp lights of a thousand blinking eyes.

***

Dawn is a long time coming and with it comes the rain. The first fine drizzle slips down the back of Athelstan’s neck while he is breaking fast. He stuffs the last bites of salted fish into his mouth and gulps it down, hurrying to bundle everything into the pack. The salt sticks to his tongue, to the back of his throat, strong and sour, and he swallows at the lingering taste, his face twisting. Already his tunic sticks to his skin, drenched by the misting rain and the fire embers fizzle. Athelstan swallows again, a short relief, and tugs the pack on, sweeping the woollen cloak over all.

A bent nail was the best Bjorn could do for a cloak pin in the end. Athelstan hunches beneath a tree, struggling with rain-slippery hands to force the dull point through the layers of finely-woven wool. The rain slips across the back of his neck and covers his skin with a sheen as if he has been gilded with dust. Frodi sits in the rain, tongue out to catch the falling sky, mouth wide and smiling. The nail squeaks through with a jolt at last and Frodi’s ears prick up. He cocks his head at Athelstan.

“No mouse, just me.” Athelstan puts the river to his right and walks, sucking at the pad of his bleeding thumb. “Just me.” Frodi shakes his head, ears thwumping, and trots up beside him.

Athelstan takes deep breaths of the sultry air, blinking off the rain that falls from the curls of his hair and beads on his eyelashes. The sky is low and grey with murk, like a bucket of dirty water, or a winter ocean. This is not the brief rage of a summer storm, but the kind of sky that hangs dim and dreary for days and weeks and months. The clouds have bitten the top from the mountain, cutting off the ceiling of the world. Athelstan frowns, squinting upwards through rain and cloud. There is no chance of seeing the path ahead.

“Here are your summer rains at last, Gyda.” The river, already flood and storm-swollen, is now pocked with pattering rain from bank to bank in this early dusk. They cannot assume a crossing before winter. They need Floki and his boat.

Over the next hour, a fog rolls in. It sweeps up the river in thick white billows and floods up the low bank into the trees. Walking in it, the trees become ghosts, looming and disappearing behind the misted, curling tendrils. The fog sweeps cold fingers across Athelstan’s skin, its teeth bite cold at the end of each breath and Athelstan’s lungs begin to burn. Despite the cloak, despite the prickling sweat of exertion, Athelstan shivers. He tugs the cloak closer about him, the folds clutched in his left fist, pulling the pack snug against his shoulders. A lump of hastily-packed food presses into his spine between his shoulderblades. He shrugs at it, huffing like a child pressed into best clothing for Mass. His belt is full to the point of being awkward - there is nowhere to put his elbows, tucked up tight beneath his covering. He rustles and thumps as he walks, fully-laden as a beast of burden. In the swollen silence of the woods, Athelstan’s breath rasps.

“That fur coat must be nice, Frodi.” And the rain drips, tickling, from his lips. “I might need you come winter.” Frodi pads softly beside, tight at Athelstan’s left hip. He keeps to Athelstan’s slow pace, shoulders rippling back and forth, his progress smooth as a snake. Athelstan, on the other hand, is awkward as a duckling. He misses his footing on a stone and bumps into the solid warmth of Frodi’s shoulder. “You would not object to being a blanket sometimes, would you?” Small chance that Ragnar will give Athelstan anything else to keep warm, not with a farm to replace. Small chance that Ragnar will keep him at all. He coughs, clearing the lump from his throat, and blinks away rain from his eyes again.

The fog and the woods make a labyrinth, a twisting, turning, changing path. Athelstan weaves between the aspen trees, ducks beneath a flailing branch, steps over a fallen, rotting trunk. The ground moss is a rich, meadow green, grown up over trees and stones and earth alike. All the rest of the world is a grey half-darkness, the dim gloom of a cave. And every crunching footstep smells of harvest time and the cold damp of freshly-tilled soil.

His eyes burn. Athelstan stops walking and rubs a hand over his face, screwing his eyes shut. Behind and to his left a blackbird trills a complicated melody. The river’s rustling roar comes from every side, in front and behind, beneath his feet. Athelstan’s heart jolts and he opens his eyes again. His feet are dry, hazy in the rolling fog, but everything has changed. The fog puddles in the hollows, swallows the gentle slope of the bank, drifts up in a haze to meet the lowering cloud.

“I think we have been turned around.” Within the space of a few moments, he has managed to get them lost. He spins about, stumbling in place. Frodi sits, fur clumping in the rain, and watches his strange dance with a quizzically tilted head. By the time Athelstan’s circle is complete everything has shifted once again. That group of three tangled trees, robed with silver moss, that boulder, hanging with glistening webs, neither there a moment before and gone again into the blank shadow of the fog. Athelstan grits his teeth and gives a sharp shrug. Too sharp, the flame in his left shoulder ignites, prodded into life by that misplaced apple and he breathes out a groan. He is tired of aching. He is just tired.

“We only need to find the river.” It cannot be that hard. They cannot be so easily lost. He picks a direction and walks ten paces, matching his step to the throbbing in his shoulder. Keeping a straight line, he climbs through the twiggy shoots of new trees, counting under his breath. Some snap underfoot, a crack as loud as an axe blow. The birds quieten. _Nine. Ten._ No river.

It is a tight space, squashed in among the spears of aspen saplings, with Frodi’s hip pressed against his, warm but immovable as stone. In here, even the moss is tinged with grey. Athelstan gives Frodi’s ear a gentle tug and takes a step to turn back, leaning his hand on Frodi’s strong shoulder.

The trees are sideways. Athelstan struggles for breath, gasping in cold fog and rain. He swallows a mouthful and it sticks in the back of his throat before it goes. His lungs are tight and cramped. And the trees are sideways, swivelled down on a hinge, growing outwards to a wall of grey cloud.

Frodi’s face appears above his, and he licks Athelstan’s chin with a warm, rough tongue.

Athelstan grasps a handful of his fur at his scruff, both fending him off and pulling himself up from his back, arched over the pack and helpless like an upended beetle. He puts his left hand down behind him for balance and the ground is gone. He spits out a panicked curse, loud in the quieting fog, and yanks at Frodi’s fur again, pulling up against the weight of the dragging pack, his left hand flailing in the empty air for another handhold.

Frodi yelps and sits backwards, claws scrabbling at the ground. It is enough to tip Athelstan forwards instead of backwards and he lands in a tumble against Frodi’s legs. He lets go, smooths down Frodi’s fur in apology, his head hunched into the crook of his arm until his breath returns to him. Then he turns back again and dangles his legs over the edge of the fog-filled precipice, squinting into the depths of the shifting cloud he is sitting in.

The fog twists and whirls, revealing a glimpse of rocky earth below before stealing it away again in a swirl of white skirts. A gully, perhaps as deep as Athelstan is tall and at the bottom, as the fog separates once more, a gargling stream flowing down to his right.

“Well, I have found where the river is, at least.” Down there somewhere in the blanketing fog. He is walking in the right direction. “And a question.”

“Where the river widens out,” Bjorn said, scribbling more lines on the floor of the hut until it resembled a nest of snakes more than anything else, “there is a gorge. You have to walk up it. Not beside it, _up_ it.” He stabbed the snakes in emphasis.

“Is this the right place?” A few feet down, Athelstan’s shoes are faded as an old painting. There is no hope of discovering if the river has changed since the fog set in. He can wait and hope it clears soon. He can walk on and see if there is another gorge. Either choice will waste time that Gyda may well not have. He chews at his lip, sucking in the taste of blood. Or he can walk up the gully and see what it turns into. It should become clear quickly enough whether he has gone astray. “ _Solvitur ambulando_ , Frodi. ‘It is solved by the walking.’” He rolls over and drops himself feet first into the gully.

***

The stream is a small, tinkling thing, running bright and happy down the centre of the wide gully bed. Athelstan walks to one side of it, picking his way up through the loose rocks that clutter the ground. A few hopeful nettles have sprung up along the edges of the stream. Athelstan leaves behind a trail of right footprints from his one soaked shoe and Frodi follows it, tucked up against the gully wall. He bumps up against Athelstan’s hip, questing out his hand beneath the cloak.

“There is no use looking for cheese, I used all I had coaxing you down here.”

Frodi whines and nips at Athelstan’s leg, managing a surly frown of his eyebrows that matches Bjorn’s quite remarkably.

“I was looking forward to it, too.” Even hard and yellowing and with the mould scraped off, it would have been a nice change from meagre rations of fish and apple, fish and apple. “And you should be looking out for that wolf, not your stomach.” The gully bed steepens suddenly and Athelstan hesitates at the foot of the incline. Rain drums on the back of his neck and patters onto the rocks. “ _Up_ the gorge. In the rain, Bjorn. Is there no other way?”

Bjorn shrugged that question away back at the hut. “I have only been there once, I only know this way. Besides, it is a mountain, there are no safe ways to cross.”

The gully begins its stretch up the mountainside wide and laughing, like a grin. The stream ripples down it. Athelstan grips a handhold at the side of the gully, root and cold earth. Best be quick about it, then.

He puffs out a quick breath, shakes his head and begins the scramble upwards into the cloud. The walls change from earth to stone, growing up above Athelstan’s head as he climbs - three times, four times his height, five - a brutal sword gash in the side of the mountain. The granite is polished black by the rain. Athelstan slows and runs his hand along the rock, polished smooth, the imprint of a wider river. Swirling orange marks paint a picture of the churning flood that carved them. Calf-height at least. A roar and a wave and nowhere to escape to this time, that would be the end of it. Head down, hunched, Athelstan’s ears fill with the _huh huh huh_ of his own breathing and the rattle of pack and tools. Time melts away.

When next he looks upwards, clammy from the heat of exertion, the edges of the gorge walls are lined with pine, tall and stately like rows of Mass candles. And ahead is a waterfall. Not much of one now, the stream flattens out to a width of three feet, plashing down the height of it in a single sheet before gathering again at the foot and swirling into its smaller path between Athelstan’s sodden feet. Still, the waterfall is fifteen feet, the gorge walls higher still above that.

“Bjorn did not mention this.” It is a careful whisper but it bounces back from the rock loud and confronting. Bjorn did not mention this. He is in the wrong place. And his stomach flips one sickening turn, twisted upside down inside. Athelstan wipes his palms on his trousers. He turns and drops down on a large rock, sucking in breaths that turn to fire in his lungs. Here the granite is smooth up to waist height, worn away in turbulent waves. Above that the rock splits into natural steps, some flat, some slanted, like a stone wall in the midst of crumbling apart.

Below, seen through the tunnel of the gorge walls, the river valley is covered in grey cloud as if in deep snow, the tops of trees disturbing the surface in points and bumps as of rough ground. He is at once close to earth and miles above, the gorge he is sitting in both steep and flat. It swirls and changes, his mind trying to make sense of the strange picture, and the disorientation of it makes Athelstan’s head spin. He shuts his eyes, resting his forehead forward in the palm of a hand. His fingers are slivers of ice against hot skin. Athelstan presses the back of his hand against his cheek and sighs. Rain trickles behind his ear and across the side of his neck, warm as Ragnar’s clammy hand.

“Swear me an oath, Priest.”

Athelstan shudders, shoulders spasming, and opens his eyes again. The world has stilled.

On the other side of the river the cliff that was an imposing wall yesterday is shrunk to a stone step so far below him, the top of it peaking through the cloud, its trees a moss. Some long way south, Kattegat nestles in the crook of the hills that wash away in waves under the dull grey sky. On a clear day, he might see something of the high paths Ragnar dragged him along so long ago.

Is the river wider? Is he in the wrong place?

“But how many gorges can there be?” The question bounces between the shelved granite walls, finding wide footholds, climbing up on the weathered steps, reaching freedom in the air above. The pines rustle an answer in the soft rain but it whispers across the walls high above and does not fall down towards him. He sits in the full silence of an empty cave, with just the slow ageing of rock and water.

He gets up and limps the short distance to the waterfall. His legs burn as hot as his face from the strain of climbing. Hours of upward struggle and now he must turn back. And down will be much slower on steep, slippery ground. One misstep and… Athelstan lays his hand on the rock. The waterfall’s misting spray mingles with the rain, slicking the back of his hand and his palm, scraped rough as lichen rock since his first fall in the river. His lungs itch inside, a hot and bloated frustration. Athelstan swallows it down but it rumbles against his ribs. He curls his fingers into a fist. Just this once, could it not have worked out right? He turns away, tapping the rock with the side of his fist and his hand slips into a niche in the rock.

He grunts low in surprise and frees it again, smoothing his fingers across the gap. It is a niche, though not worn by the elements but carved flat and deep - yes, there are tool marks, lines cut into the rock inside - about the size of a hand or foot. He steps back and now it is only a shadow. But there are more of the same, from the foot to the top of the face, spaced at a man’s climbing stride.

Athelstan grins. “A ladder. Not the wrong place after all, Frodi.” He freezes, the smile dropping from his face. “Frodi.” At his name, Frodi gets up from a long sprawl and lays his head across Athelstan’s elbow. Athelstan scrubs the back of his neck. “I don’t suppose you climb ladders? No. What am I to do with you, then?” Athelstan slides the pack off and crouches against the rock with it, feeling through the contents. He huffs, tugging a length of rope up from the very bottom. He runs it through his hands. It’s short and thin, a four-strand flax, good enough for a leash. Athelstan lays his head back against the bare rock. The top of the waterfall is the lip of a pot, curved out and overhanging. There is no good in dragging anything up there. But the gorge walls, clumped with natural steps, they present possibility. Athelstan loops the rope around Frodi’s neck, twists it round and through itself into a thick knot and tugs it fast and snug. It takes up the larger part of his palm.

He could take it off at any time. Ragnar has not even bothered to tighten it since it slipped, the bulk of the knot thumping hollow against his sternum now that the rope is slack. Athelstan winds his fingers around it, slow and silent, the rough fibres scratching at the web between thumb and first finger.

“Just how long are you planning to think about it first?” Ragnar asks the tree he is pissing on. His waste-water trickles down the cliffside path towards Athelstan.

Athelstan shuffles his feet awkwardly astride it, wrinkling his nose against the smell. He tightens his hand on the knot. “You cannot—”

“Do it.” Ragnar rolls one shoulder in a wide shrug. “We will see how far you get.”

“Shut up.” Athelstan lets go of the knot and finds the end of the leash. “Come on, Frodi.”

The first few steps are wide and easy, closely placed, flat, just like the beginning of a huge staircase. Frodi hops up those easily enough, ears flapping up at each little jump. The next is higher and further, slanted down away from them. Athelstan clutches at the wall for balance, the rope loose in his grasp. It is a long stride to get there, his shoes slipping on the surface of it, but manageable.

He gives a gentle tug of the rope. “Hup!” But Frodi digs his heels in and sits down where he is -twisted and leaning against the gorge wall. Athelstan wipes warm rain from his hot face. “Bjorn would not be happy with me if I left you behind.” He tugs again, harder, and pats at the rock. “Up! Come on.” Frodi is unmoved. Athelstan rubs at the ache in his shoulder again, prods at the lump of apple in the pack. “Stubborn. You win.” He almost falls off the step, juggling pack and rope to get out the apple, his arm pressed up hard against cold, wet rock. And getting the pack back on again is a task full of twisted cloak and banged elbows and his left shoulder is pulsing by the time he is done and crouching down at the edge of the step. The handle of Rannveyg’s knife rasps against the wall and Athelstan wipes sweat from his forehead again. It has grown in great patches in the armpits of his tunic too, hot and heavy. He sniffs and catches the odour of himself, stale and sweet.

“This is the last food I have, you understand,” he says, holding out a piece of the apple and giving the rope another suggestive tug. This time Frodi complies, hopping with ease up onto the thin step and gobbling up the food with only a slight pause at the sourness of it.

The steps continue to thin and lift apart as they climb. The larger steps have fallen, leaving grey shadows of their presence on the black rock, crumpled remains at the foot of the gorge wall. They are a bare eight feet below the top now - not far for a determined dog the size of a man - and if Athelstan stretches on tiptoes he can grasp a handhold on the ground above. But now Frodi won’t come. He digs his feet into the grooves on the rock shelf and stiffens into an immoveable object. Athelstan stops with one foot up on the next step, his knee wedged against the rock, thigh squashing the flat head of the wood axe into the flesh of his stomach. The rock is slimy with thin green moss and Athelstan’s panting breaths suck in the smell-taste of it, of wet dog and stale sun-warmed pondwater. He pulls as hard as he can on the rope but Frodi may as well be a statue, carved from stone.

Athelstan shuffles up onto the step with a grunt. He taps the final remains of the apple on the step, clutched between finger and thumb of his left hand, tugs again on the rope, pleads, shouts. Within a moment, Frodi changes from stubborn to vicious. His eyes harden, his ears flatten against the back of his head and he lets out a long, rumbling growl.

Athelstan flinches, dropping the rope, which falls to dangle over the edge of Frodi’s shelf. “I do not wish to leave you behind.” He is so close. If he stands now, he will be able to see over the edge of the gorge. The waterfall is only a short walk and a small drop. “But Gyda is more important than an animal.” Frodi’s growls turn to snarls, teeth bared in a tight clench between drawn-back lips. Athelstan is not his master and Frodi has run out of patience. Athelstan shivers, leaning his hot forehead against the cold rock. But he is still God’s creature. “Stay then. Stay,” he says again, biting the word out hard between chattering teeth, “Floki and I will be back for you in a few hours.” He works his way up to stand, pressed close to the rock on the thin foothold. Below and to his left the gorge floor stretches down and away and disappears into distant cloud. How far to the bottom now? How long would he fall?

Frodi begins to bark. Each one echoes between the gorge walls, loud as a lightning snap at the crest of a thunder’s rumbling. The noises buzz inside Athelstan’s chest and cold sparks shoot up his spine. He hauls himself out of the gorge.

The moment he stands the wind hits him. Impossibly, it is worse than it was on the ridge at the leading edge of the storm. Here snow drifts between the black rocks and the wind scours it across the bare side of the mountain in swirling bursts. It scratches across his face. He grips his cloak tightly about him and starts upwards. It is slippery with wet rock and compacted snow. His toes numb, his ears and nose and lips too and it feels a hundred years since he stood up into this buffeting wind. The wind tugs the cloak about his neck, strangling and releasing him according to its own whims. It snaps about him, first at his face, then at his back, then up from the ground with a handful of sharp snow. His eyelids sting.

Athelstan turns mountain-ward, working around a large boulder, frozen to the mountainside with ice. The wind is at his back again, pushing him upward into a bank of deep, crunching snow. His feet sink down into the powdery top then hit sudden resistance on ice beneath. At the next step, his shoes are frozen, his socks crackling inside them. From behind comes a smell, the putrid sweet stink of Eldwyn’s sickroom in the summer months, of festering wounds and fever. Athelstan turns to find the source of it, some newly dead thing perhaps. And then he is down, pinned, shoulder into the snow, his right arm twisted and trapped beneath him, a weight mountain-heavy atop him. And the sun goes out.


	18. Chapter 18

He is crushed in the black void of a wine press, his head and chest caught between the floor and the squeezing wooden plate, and each whining turn of the screw brings down the inevitable weight of it upon him. He is buried beneath the fallen mountain, deep inside a grave of snow. The cold fire burns and melts the skin from his cheek. Outside, the wind has quieted to a low, growling moan and by his left eye a tiny hopeful light flashes, a lamp in the distant darkness.

He twitches his fingers, digging his left hand up and out of the dusting snow, reaching out towards the glimmer of daylight. Above him, the rocks roll and shift. The weight forces his arm down again and across his chest, squeezing air out of his lungs, then settling still further in a soft, terrible falling. His breath wheezes out from the bottom of his chest, high and reedy between his chapped lips. And the wind breathes out hot in his ear. It stinks of rotting meat, of old blood, of approaching death.

Ice spreads through his body like sap in a waking tree, starting hard in his centre and trickling out to the tips of his fingers in a slow tingling river. The mountain growls. The noise shivers warm across his face. He can _taste_ it. Bile spills up Athelstan’s throat and into his mouth, salt and vinegar, burning his tongue. He tries to swallow it and the muscle beneath his jaw convulses instead in a white-hot flash of agony. Athelstan’s body jerks and stills and the breath he has left slips out in a long, low moan. He sucks it back in and holds it in the small space of his quivering lungs.

The animal above him huffs at his noise and rearranges itself, its legs scrape-sliding against the leather pack on Athelstan’s back. His cloak is crumpled up beneath him, Athelstan’s own weight tethering him to the ground by his neck. The animal breathes out its excitement in snorting puffs, each snuffling _ha_ a ghostly laugh so loud in the shell of Athelstan’s ear that the sound could be coming from inside himself. And something trickles across his face, a hot and crooked line burning down from eye to ground. He doesn’t know if it is tears or blood.

He twitches his left hand again and inches it down across his body to his belt, slipping numb fingertips across the weapons there. The press tightens around his head, the air growls in and out of the rumbling chest crushed against Athelstan's side and the creature twists with a hard jerk backwards that threatens to break Athelstan's neck. He whimpers, hears himself and cuts off the noise hard in his throat. He sounds like prey, like wounded prey. He cannot swallow and his mouth and throat fill with hot blood that runs down in a choking, iron-tinged warmth. He pants in breaths through his nose, trying to ignore the bubbling chaos in his throat, but in doing so he breathes instead the creature's stale, rotten air as it huffs out, its jaw wrapped around Athelstan's face.

His utility knife is buried beneath the animal's belly, the wood axe is trapped between him and the earth, the handle beneath Athelstan's hip. After that, there is only the sax, strapped into the sheath that hangs below his belt. He pants another inward breath and presses his fingers against the hilt, fumbling and slipping. His fingertips are snow-numb and touch-blind and Athelstan tries until he can hear the tiny rasp of his fingernails catching at the metal. He pushes. The blade slips against leather and slides down out of its sheath and thuds into the snow. An inch, perhaps, but not enough.

Athelstan groans in the back of his throat and the noise bubbles in pooling blood. The animal grips tighter again and Athelstan grunts, coughs and chokes. Panic swells in such a sudden, crashing wave that he is overwhelmed by it. He struggles, his feet scrabbling at the slippery snow, heels slamming on the ice beneath the powdered top. He shoves and scratches, tries to lift himself, to roll, to twist, to press the sax free of its sheath down into the ice below. But he might as well fight the earth itself. The creature is immoveable and soon enough Athelstan runs out of breath for his struggle, the blackness spotted with white and grey. This is inescapable. Athelstan slumps. Air squeaks through blood down his throat.

Old Brun was a ratter. She caught them scurrying in the yard around the grain stores at night, sometimes in the straw of the household beds in winter. It was not a bloody thing, only a pounce, a controlling bite, a sharp shake and all was done. Athelstan grips a handful of the creature’s fur - coarse as Frodi’s coat, warm with thrumming blood in the body above - and holds on. He is done.

The creature moves again, twisting Athelstan’s head back and exposing his throat. It tramples him, those paws bigger than Athelstan’s hands pressing down on Athelstan’s side and squeezing out the very last of his breath. It mouths at him, its teeth twisting around inside the flesh of his face and the back of his head. Lightning flashes inside his skull, blinding white. His chest screams, but there is no air and no noise comes out, rather the absence of it, the soundlessness of agony. The creature’s teeth are lightning, scraping against bone at the back of his neck, scratching across the roots of his teeth inside his mouth, leaving lines of flashing pain, pulsing in the ink-black sky of his vision. Blood drips thick as honey down into the snow.

Sometimes the rats would not die at first. They would squeal and scream and fight back, twisting their bodies into knots. Sometimes Old Brun would need to bite the neck, one quick snap, and blood sprayed out across the ground. But for that, she would have to let go.

Athelstan releases his handhold and drops his hand into the snow again, searching out the hilt of the sax where it is trapped against the ground and winding his fingers around it. For an age, he lies perfectly still, his lungs burning a growing fire, with the scratch of the creature’s teeth against his and the pattering of blood onto the snow. He is preserved here, in this moment of terror, until the end of time.

Then, in an instant, the press releases. Athelstan is left blind from the shocking emptiness, from the lack of teeth and breath and darkness.

_Move!_

He rolls towards the animal, unsheathing the sax and swinging his left arm out away from him, extended, elbow locked, the sax gripped in an awkward backhand, stabbing down towards the ground. But the animal - a wolf, a huge wolf - dodges back and snaps out, lips drawn back over gleaming white teeth stained a deep red with Athelstan’s blood. The sax buries itself in the ice, hilt deep, and now Athelstan is splayed on the ground, arms spread like a Christ offered up for sacrifice. Too slow. The wind holds its breath.

The wolf lunges, snow crunching beneath his hind paws. Athelstan stiffens. Then a shadow hits, a flash of grey across the snow that lands a direct blow to the wolf’s chest. The impact knocks him over onto his side, and his teeth snap shut on empty air, clacking together with the loud finality of a slammed book.

Athelstan rolls over onto hands and knees, spitting out mouthfuls of blood onto the snow. In his head, flint and steel strike blinding sparks to the rapid beat of his heart.

The wolf springs up with an agility that does not match its lumbering size, like Ragnar, all meat and muscle and litheness. And now they are circling, the wolf and the shape. It's Frodi, of course it's Frodi, his paws bleeding into the snow. It hurt him, the scramble up the gorge wall. He leaves footprints of rose, a bouquet of flowers each as large as Athelstan's palm. But opposite the wolf, Frodi is a tiny, mewling lamb. The wolf is broader at the shoulder, taller and heavier, his face a black mask bleeding into grey about piercing amber eyes. His muscles ripple as smooth as an ocean wave beneath long black fur and his breath is the deep, rumbling breath of a monster, of a demon.

Athelstan swallows down mouthfuls of blood and fear and they roil together in his stomach, a sickening mixture, like milk and wine. For a moment, the wolf looks at him, focusing too-sharp eyes on Athelstan’s face and he sits, frozen onto the ice, his breath trapped in his throat, until the wolf looks away again, back to Frodi. Athelstan grips both shaking hands around the sax’s hilt and tugs it free of the ice.

The wolf launches, so quickly that his movement blurs, and he and Frodi become a tangle of fur and tooth and tail. They are down, then up, together, apart. For a moment, Frodi has the wolf's neck, clamping his teeth shut on the thick ruff, but the wolf shakes him off. Frodi skitters backwards across the compacted snow, his hindquarters fumbling and slipping and scratching for balance. The wolf darts in then, nipping Frodi on the back and legs and haunches. He dances back and lunges again - in and out, attack and retreat - quick as a striking snake.

Athelstan, on his feet now, raises the sax, his fingers tight about the handle, but this grey and that grey whirl together in the whirling snow and the movement is too fast.

Frodi is panting. He snarls, showing red gums, but it ends in a whine, one of his back legs collapsing beneath him. His haunches are drenched in blood, a thick red mat in his fur that glistens in the light. In places, lines of torn flesh gape scarlet. He tries again for the wolf’s neck but misses, the wolf dodging back out of the way. Frodi is too slow now, hopping on three legs, and the wolf paces around him, his head low and hackles up, turning his back to Athelstan.

Athelstan trips forward, snow and ice crackling like fallen leaves beneath his feet, and stabs at him. But the wolf turns in an instant - a child's spinning top, a toy made of teeth and death - and Athelstan's blow goes astray, slipping a glancing blow across his back. The wolf snaps and sinks his teeth deep into the meat of Athelstan's lower right leg. Blood spatters down into the snow, dripping lines of black-red. Athelstan falls, his arms flailing out, his head smashing back into the snow. The world flashes white then black. Teeth crunch against bone and this time he screams. The mountain takes up the call, echoing all along the lonely peaks, and the sound of his own terror fills his ears. In his panic he hits out, the sax’s blade scratching across the wolf’s shoulder, and the wolf steps backwards, dragging him through the snow by his leg and _oh God, please_ that is worse.

“Stop,” he begs, through waves of pulsing grey like clouds over his eyes, “Stop!”

“Stop!” mocks the mountain, spitting his English back at him.

Frodi snatches at the wolf’s throat again, this time coming up from below, locking his teeth tight behind the wolf’s jaw and twisting himself upwards, forcing the wolf onto the ground with his snow-white underbelly exposed. His leg free, Athelstan pushes himself up into a sitting position and swings the sax down again, stabbing at the closest thing - the wolf’s eye. But the fight is fast and vicious and already Frodi is on the ground and the wolf is up and Athelstan slices a thin wound into the side of its face and it is gone, back across the trampled, bloody circle. Frodi jumps up onto three feet, ears flat back against his skull and whining. Athelstan takes longer. His leg is agony, his shoe full of blood that thickens when it touches the snow. He heaves sobbing breaths, laden with the drifting snow that slices sharp across his tongue.

The wolf darts in again, evading Frodi's open, defensive mouth and biting hard at his haunch. Frodi screeches and his leg collapses completely, his foot slapping to the floor, the knee turned outwards and hanging from a severed joint. The wolf darts away again, licking blood from his lips. Blood flows and freezes into long black icicles on Frodi's fur.

Athelstan stumbles closer again, his hands bright red with cold, the sax frozen into his grip. The wolf’s body stiffens - his pupils blown black and glittering - and launches, pushing off with hind feet. The snow crackles, the breaking of a thousand diamonds, and Athelstan takes a limping step forward and slams the sax down with all of his remaining strength, right into the centre mass of him. The blade enters the wolf’s back just at his shoulder, glancing off bone inside and jolting to slide in at an angle. Athelstan tightens his grip and shoves the blade right in to the hilt. The wolf gives an ear-piercing yip and slips sideways, clumsy and staggering, taking the sax with him.

Athelstan fumbles for the axe next, limping after him, but Frodi gets there first, leaping at the wolf’s shoulder. They go down again, heads locked together, a mass of teeth and blood and fur, twisting back and forth. Athelstan stands, axe raised and shaking, waiting for a sure blow. Their snarls rumble, their breaths puff out into one white, rising cloud. Blood drips onto the packed snow, blood spreads light red on their necks and shoulders and oozes outwards in the trampled ice of their fighting ring. In all this pristine mountain, in the wide sea of glittering snow, here is a slaughterhouse.

The wolf is down again, his belly smeared red. The sax, still buried in his shoulder, cracks against the ground, the hilt skittering away across the mountainside and over the lip of the gorge. Frodi jerks his head sideways and Athelstan steps forward, landing the head of the axe in the wolf’s soft underbelly. It sinks in, fur and flesh puckering around the blade, and the blood-wet handle slips from Athelstan’s hand. He grabs it, pulls back, and the wolf’s belly splits open as on a seam. His entrails come sliding out in one solid mass then separate on the hill of his belly, slithering down onto the snow like boiled eels, a sloppy, steaming pile of red and brown.

And, at last, everything is still.

Athelstan stands frozen and breathless, his fingers pinched in a death grip around the handle of the axe. His hands and feet are numbed into hard flesh and frosted with blood. His whole body shivers. His teeth chatter shut on his tongue, adding more blood to the mix in his mouth that trickles out now onto his lips and freezes there. The wind moans, or he does.

Finally, the wolf takes one last rasping breath and his shuddering chest stills and slackens, his body slumping into the snow. He is bigger than Athelstan, from nose to tail. Athelstan was dead, for some long minutes there, with his head in the wolf’s jaws. Dead even though he was yet breathing.

“Good boy, Frodi.” The word whistles out where it should not and Athelstan tries to poke his tongue around his mouth, to prod out the wounds, but it slops from one side to the other, unfeeling. It is too cold, too bloody. Floki will have to help him. And he laughs at that until his head pulses with blinking stars and he has to stop, crushing a fist into his forehead. “We need to get out of the cold, Frodi.” Frodi lies still, his torn leg askew on the ground, a part-butchered animal. Athelstan fumbles his fingers beneath Frodi’s rope collar and gives a gentle tug. “If I can manage on one-and-a-half legs, you can manage on three for a short while.” He tugs again, pulling Frodi’s head away from his tangle with the wolf’s. Frodi slips off and down into the snow, the wolf’s teeth still clenched shut about his throat. Thick blood oozes out from the corners of the wolf’s mouth. “Oh,” Athelstan breathes. The wind sucks the sound away.

For an eternity, Athelstan cannot gather his thoughts. They are as swirling as the snow, all wild wind and nonsense. Confused, he releases the rope and shoves his fingers instead into the wolf’s mouth between the horrible teeth, prying the jaw open. The mouth is still warm. He shoves the wolf’s heavy head away into the deeper snow. The sight of Frodi’s mutilated throat brings some sense together out of Athelstan’s shocked stupidity. This is his fault.

Snow falls, flecking the grey fur with stars. It melts at first, then as Frodi’s body cools it begins to settle, covering the mangled leg, the bloody haunches, the shoulders stained with the wolf’s blood. It tips Frodi’s muzzle in silver, like one of Athelstan’s paintings. Athelstan shoves his bloody leg out stiff to one side and - holding his breath and shutting his eyes - drops, inelegant, into a crouch. A sound escapes, a moaning hum, and tears seep out. It takes a long minute for his tightened chest to release and allow breath.

Trembling, Athelstan reaches out and scratches Frodi’s favourite place behind the ears. “This is not such a bad place to sleep.” Above and below, the sky is lined with grey cloud but between those shines a band of clear blue sky as vivid as a summer sea. Snow falls across it, flecking its far ocean with a near and sparkling foam. And the wind dies down, leaving behind a silence. There are no birds on this summit, no rustling trees, no constant cadent insects chirruping in grass. Here is the silence of the earth’s in-held breath, the momentary space between gasp and release.

“’Therefore the death of man and of beasts is one,’” Athelstan speaks low into the quiet, each word releasing in a fog from his frozen lips, “’and the condition of them both is equal: as man dies, so they also die. All things breathe alike and man has nothing more than beast. All things are subject to vanity.’” He strokes Frodi’s ears and the fur crackles with ice. “’And all things go to one place: of earth they were made, and into earth they return together.’”

The snow slips a final, soft sheet over Frodi’s head and Athelstan’s hand together, turning all shape to a hazy grey suggestion, the here-and-not-quite of pre-dawn. As a child, awake and yet not, bleary-eyed in the cold gloom, the folds of his blanket would make monsters and bears and other cunning shapes pulled from his dreams into the between-land. Now, Frodi’s shoulder is a fold in the blanket of snow, his ear a wrinkle, his eye a mistaken shadow.

“You go ahead now. But in many years, I hope, when he is old and you are yet young, you will see your master again.” Athelstan pulls his hand away at last, wiping off the clinging snow on his skewed cloak with slow and careful movements. For a time, the print of his hand remains, cupped about the fading suggestion of Frodi’s face. Bjorn held him so when he said farewell, his chubby fingers curled around the line of Frodi’s jaw to hold the giant head in place for a kiss. Now the snow kisses him. And Athelstan leaves him there, looking out into the endless blue sky, pressing down into the breathless silence of the mountain.


	19. Chapter 19

Athelstan cannot stop shivering. The wind has picked up again, playing a song to the rain’s drumming, whistling a lonely tune across the top of the gorge, fifty feet above, where a thin ribbon of grey sky stretches between towering walls of rain-glossed black rock. Inside Athelstan’s shoes, his socks crackle with bloody ice that melts into cold and gluey lumps between his tingling toes. His knee has left a patternless mess of blood along the wall behind him, half a mile back to the top of the hissing waterfall, as if someone has dropped a loaded brush and it has rolled, bump by bump, down the folio of a book. Now it is only a waste of colour, a ruined page.

There is no choice here but to walk in the churning stream. It seethes up around his ankles, bursting into rose-red blooms about his right foot and swirling away, carrying Athelstan’s blood down the mountainside. Though he is careful, each step stabs knife-sharp through the muscle of his leg and up across the side of his knee. Athelstan bites in the pain, teeth clamped on a bloody tongue, the lightning storm snapping through his head. But it will not be contained, it bubbles up and over, escaping his throat in guttural grunts. It does not sound like him. It sounds like sex, like Ragnar and Lagertha’s lovemaking, and Athelstan flushes hot, swallowing down disgust that tastes of blood and rot. It’s strange, how agony and ecstasy can sound so alike.

The gorge thins and dips. Water bubbles up to his calf, lapping at the black stain on his trouser leg. Athelstan shuffles downhill, his toes pressed into the ground, his fingers scratching for handholds on the smooth walls. On his belt, the axehead scrapes against the rock with a thin wail, like fingernails on a slate.

“’Hiero quem genuit—’” Sigeric’s eyebrows fold down over his face, squeezing his features between them and a pair of caterpillar lips. “It’s a stylus, not a mattock, boy. No need to dig ditches with it. ‘—genuit solymis Davidica proles.’”

If Athelstan blinks hard, his letters mark the walls, scratched white lines in the gloom. They are uneven, misshapen, the mismatched scrawl of a child still learning. But he is in a ditch now, and the finer points of Latin grammar will not get him out of it. The rain troubles the skin of the troubled water, pooling about his knees, digging frozen fingers into the wound at his knee, pushing and pulling at the boiling pain beneath his skin. There is a distant whine too, a far-whistling wind different from the one above that sweeps the mountaintop. Athelstan stops and listens, holding his breath, and it disappears. He shakes his head and the walls tip and spin. He must blink them upright again, letting out a trembling breath.

The way sweeps right and left, and the dual peaks of the Ram’s Horns rise into that thin ribbon of sky from either side of the gorge, slicing out two great vaulted black emptinesses overhead. There is nothing but black rock before and behind now, dark as a cellar on a moonless night, and the pale spirits of Athelstan’s hands are his only company, tracing their way through the clouds of his own breath that break about his face in small, fleeting bursts of warmth. Upwards again, the walls undulate past, smooth as snakeskin, and the stream recedes, tugging at the leather thongs of Athelstan’s shoes and teasing at the hems of his trousers.

Now there is a new susurration, a whisper as of silk kissing marble. The walls brush at his tunic sleeves, just a soft caress at first, then an insistent press like two gripping hands at his shoulders. Athelstan shuffles the pack off and turns sideways, tugging it after him in the wake of his tangled cloak. The wall is a handspan in front of his face, close enough that his breath mists on it, making temporary islands in the sheen of rain. The patches form and release fast and hard, his trembling gasps pressed close to his ears by the closeness of the walls.

“It gets a little narrow,” Bjorn warned him back at the hut, concentrating on his map-drawing, with a minute shrug, “but don’t worry about it. Just keep going.”

“A _little_ narrow.” The walls echo Athelstan’s complaint. Ragnar must hold his breath for this part. Just how long would death take, wedged in here between the bones of the earth? Water gurgles past, splashing ice against his ankles. Athelstan runs his hand across the rippled watermarks in the rock by his face. Sweat tears on his forehead and drips onto his wrist but his shivering shakes it off again. A flood would be a mercy before the end.

The wood of the altar is cold on his palm. Every noise is loud as thunder - the sigh of his breath, the scratch of his robe against the wall - and Ragnar’s footsteps echo on the stone floor, slow and inevitable. Athelstan chokes, tilting his head back as far as it will fit, his skull scratching the rock behind. Is the sky dimmer now? “‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…’”

“Death,” the rocks repeat.

Athelstan breathes the word in again and the wind cries above. He pushes and pulls with foot and hand, sliding in slow and tedious steps, the pack scraping after him. He is so far underground. He is a collection of old bones, lying between the layers of rock. Water sloshes around his legs and at each shallow breath his ribs press against the walls. The gorge breathes back, squeezing and releasing and squeezing again. He is going to die in here, in this black cellar, in this cold grave. He is a man drowning, gasping at the roiling surface. No, think of something else. Think of the warning-bell tower at Lindisfarne, of peering up through the rows and rows of spiralled wooden stairs from the dusty entrance. At dusk, the grey light pricks through the small windows at the very top while the bats flit to and from their roosts in the roof above the silent bells. Those bells were rung only once. The walls cradle his bones like a coffin.

There is the whine again. It whistles below the gurgling stream, below his pained exhalations.

“Wouldn’t you like to join us?” Ragnar’s naked skin is sleek with sweat and there is a thick, sweet-sour smell about him that Athelstan cannot help but connect to the noises he and Lagertha were making only a few moments before.

He clutches the cover of his book as hard as he can. His fingers are all nerves, riffling the edges of the pages between the boards. “No.” He tastes rain, cold drops of water dissolving into blood on his tongue. Are those footsteps behind? Not those of a man, but the padding of four soft feet. “Frodi?”

The gorge calls too and in its hesitant echo, Frodi's crying voice returns.

But Frodi is dead and buried. Athelstan looks about for another explanation. Now the whine comes from ahead, from above, from below and at last Athelstan realises - the noise comes from himself; it is his own breath whistling out of his broken cheek. There are no footsteps, Athelstan has killed Bjorn’s friend. He almost stops at the memory of it, at the breath-stealing guilt of his inadequacy, but then the rock turns him again and spits him out into open air.

Here is a vast, hidden plateau, cupped between the Ram’s Horns and the sides of the mountain. In the centre, a lake shines back the perfect, unbroken reflection of snow-patched rock and misty sky. Athelstan lifts a shaking and bloodied hand up to the face of the heavens. The rain has stopped.

Amongst the dreary shades, as if the painter quite by accident splashed the wrong pigment across it, golden stripes of creeping buttercup sweep down to frame the mirror of the lake. They make a gentle rustling underfoot and Athelstan lowers himself down in a soft patch of them, dropping the pack behind him, his legs stretched out beside the water.

“A wonderful mess you are now, Athelstan.” His soaked and bloody trousers hang close around his thin bones, the stain patched and wavering on one leg just as they were with Uxi’s blood some days ago. How many? He has lost count of the time. The sky is the same swirling grey from east to west. It could be noon or dusk, summer or winter. He drops his head into his hand, pressing his finger and thumb into the dip of his temple on either side. The sharp ache there sparks to the beat of his heart, pulsing bright and dark, a shining star.

He resettles himself, leaning back against the pack, squinting around the flashing pain into the muted daylight, and the cloak slips from his shoulder. He lets it lie, bunched and uncomfortable about his throat, the bent nail rubbing rust onto the neck of his tunic. There are bloodstains there too, spattered all down his shoulder and chest. Athelstan lays his hand on his knee, scratching at the rough wool with his fingernails. He should look. No, he shouldn’t look. His fingers are red as holly berries now, tingling and numb. He should wait until he has shelter and a fire and help. But Floki - Athelstan laughs again, just a small noise, croaking in his throat - Floki is none of those things for him. It is safer to do it without him. He swallows and his face flares with burning lines. The leg wound first.

The trouser leg sticks partway. Athelstan tugs it until it releases from his skin with a gush of warm blood that slips in thick streams down his calf and drips onto the flowers, turning them to rust. He presses his hands down on the wound, heel above heel and the weight of his body behind, squeezing it shut against the cold ground. He looks away and imagines squeezing out the hot pain onto the bloody flowers but instead, another ache thrums through his shoulder and neck and up into his head. Blood oozes up between his fingers. Athelstan shivers. His hands slip with a sucking, squelching noise like someone walking through thick mud. How did he get here?

“All I had to do was mend a fence.” His teeth chatter, each impact a hammer blow in his head. He shakes his head, but he cannot shake sense into the world. He is here because of a fence, or because of Kattegat, or because he spoke, or because he hid. But he can trace the roots as far back as he likes, it will not heal the poisoned tree. And if he dies, the children die.

When the flow of blood ebbs again, Athelstan eases back, lifting his hands up, open and helpless. The wolf’s teeth have punctured two opposing pointed arcs into the meat of his leg, between them the angry purple rash of crushed flesh. These are no tidy marks, no neat scribing this, but the top teeth have ripped lines into him like the gills on a fish. He dips his hand into the perfect mirror of the lake. Curling grey clouds sit within his cupped fingers. He picks them up and pours them over the wound, where they shatter into a thousand ruby pieces and scatter onto the ground.

Gyda’s bandage on his wrist is grey with dirt, as grey as the rocky ground. He unwinds it - revealing the wasted skin, wrinkled and mottled purple-brown - and washes the linen off in the clear water. It barely goes twice around his calf, covering only the worst of the bites, where the wolf’s longest teeth stabbed down deep into the muscle. He tugs the knot tight with his fingernails at the very end of the rag. They are ripped and battered, the nail beds bruised, the quick exposed on some. And there he hesitates, leaning one hand on the buttercups, turned towards the water yet caught at the edge of the shore.

The lake’s reflection is perfect.

He should look.

He doesn’t want to. His left cheek is cracked with pain, a mosaic from his jaw to his eye and across the back of his neck. Athelstan tugs on the leather strings around his neck, pulls the cross and the wolf-head free of his tunic and clasps them both in the hollow of his fist. “Courage,” he mutters, taking a shallow, shivering breath. And he leans forward over the water.

The lake’s reflection is perfect. Athelstan’s face is not.

He lets go of his handful and traces the wounds with hovering fingers, skimming the bloody mess with the pad of his thumb. Here the wolf has dug in, has twisted and pulled and split open his flesh. Black, clotted blood decorates his cheekbone, just below his eye and in stripes along his upper and lower jaws, a sloppy marginalia. His reflection winces and the fat gapes open in a twisted grin, showing gum and teeth through the window of his flesh.

Athelstan jerks back with a muted cry of horror and twists away until his ribs twinge from the strain, as if he can get away from himself if only he turns far enough. He scrubs his hand on the ground, scratching his fingertips into numbness and squashing the buttercups into the rock - a twist of blue and yellow. He will be sick. And the more he thinks that he cannot, not with that hole in his face, the higher the bile rises in his throat, warm and thick.

Pretend. Pretend it’s not your face. He touches the amulet again, wiping blood across it. But blood is just blood and flesh is only flesh, he has seen its like before. “’From dust we are made, and to dust we shall return.’” That grotesque statue is nothing to be frightened of. He has faced worse.

And it’s true, in the end. The markings wash away, bubble up new, wash away again until what is left is bruised and ripped and clean. He has no linen for that, he has no needle and thread. He needs Floki after all and even then it will scar, crumpled and pitted as an old fruit, only good for the pigs.

Athelstan twists his head so that only the whole side is visible, ending in the peak of his nose, though there is a scratch, beaded in red broken skin, that summits that hill and starts down towards his smooth cheek. And even on that side, his skin is a pale near-grey. "It is a good thing you have been taught not to be vain," he chides himself, and the perfect half-face in the water shows him a half-frown and ducks away.

***

On the other side of the lake, a small pass brings him out onto the far side of the mountain at last. The range he stands on stretches south-east along another wide river, sharpening abruptly near the end into a sheer grey cliff, so that it gives the impression of a pointed finger, protruding into the far blue-grey haze of the sea. And if this is the finger, then beyond the water below is the outstretched thumb - a mottled lowland of woods and purple heath rolling outwards until it, too, meets an expanse of water.

Here, the sky is clear and the air sun-warmed, though the sun is slipping behind him to balance atop the Ram's Horns as a shivering jewel within the mountain's haze. Below him, a thin, dusty path wends down the slopes through stubby stalks of rain-sparkled grass and Athelstan's muscles loosen a little. Bjorn's 'just follow the path down' lost its simplistic appeal at about the same time as 'just follow the gorge up' turned into a bloodbath. But there are no wolves or waterfalls here and deep down in the valley, the tree-lined river sparkles a pure, woad blue. It is as though Athelstan has stepped into another world.

The path largely follows the contours of the slope, twisting hereabouts around a rain-smoothed boulder or a sudden sheer drop, but otherwise descending in a slow back-and-forth. Athelstan goes a little side-on, leading with his left leg and shuffling his right after it. Even so, the descent is hard going and soon his knee is swollen agony again, a newly shining bloodstain spreading along the wool of his trousers within the dark patch of the first. His leg begins to quake at every step.

Eventually, the rocky grassland ends and Athelstan steps into ferns that sweep across the lower slopes in every shade of gold. To the northwest, the pine woods spring up from them in a crown of green, spreading far along the side of the mountain and into the distance. Somewhere within them is Floki’s house, sitting close above a wooden pier. Athelstan guesses another hour or two, at this staggering pace, to get down to the river, and the same again to work along it as Bjorn advised.

“Find the pier first, you’ll miss it otherwise,” Bjorn told him. “Floki’s house is part of the woods, so he doesn’t displease the landgods.”

“But it is too far,” Athelstan argues now. Even alone his voice is broken and shamed, but he cannot walk so long. His skin prickles cold and hot on the back of his neck. He will have to take another risk. “Just do not let there be bears,” he pleads, pointing himself directly towards the woods and picking a way through the ferns in that direction. It is part prayer and part hope, faint and faithless both.

The air rises warm and sweet between the ferns’ hulking crowns, lining a tiny rut of dusty ground that traverses the mountainside. It could be a deer trail, it might be one of Floki’s paths - the undergrowth sprung up over it joyful and unfettered in the six weeks he has been away with Ragnar - or it might be nothing at all. The fern tops are sharp-edged as knives at this time of year, crackling against his clothing and slicing across his fingers with small, whispering scratches. But the lower plants are still green and they shiver off rusted clouds as he passes, following the path’s - if that is what it is - slow and steady glide down along the mountainside and into the soft shade of the pine trees.

The sun's breaking light, all but gone now behind the mountain, sends a few last beams down the incline towards the river. It picks out stripes of gold and green and in the air the fluttering yellow wisp of a brimstone butterfly. Athelstan grips the trunk of a tree, his trembling leg jostling a shower of rain from the lower branches, and peers down at the river. Between the trees, their trunks splintering the blue into a hundred shards, the wooden pier is difficult to find. But it's not impossible. It is there, thinly disguised in the branches of the woods above, and beside it on the bank, a boat has been pulled up out of the water. It's not a faering, for there is no room for a mast and there are only two oars laid up inside it. This he is close enough to see if he squints, but there is still a fair distance of steep slope between him and it.

“Here we are, Floki.” He pauses at his own words, and the quiet of the woods rises around him. A keen loneliness grows inside him, a physical pain in his chest. “Here _I_ am." He cannot pick out the shape of Floki's house yet, so he aims at the pier and works down, stopping after each crackling, trembling step to listen. His chest is wrapped in a band that pulls tighter and tighter. Floki carries an axe, and Athelstan is here alone. "Bjorn sent me," he whispers to himself, practising, "Bjorn sent me." 

Something clatters in the bushes and he jerks to his right, his leg folding beneath him and collapsing him into a fern. A rabbit darts up the hill, weaving this way and that, its tiny white tail flashing as it hops. Still the woods are quiet except the soft wittering of birds. “Bjorn sent me,” he calls out, pressing a palm to his racing heart. He waits for Floki to appear, the grinning skeleton of his face sliding out from behind a tree - eyes black-rimmed and hollow - but nothing happens.

Athelstan gets back to his feet. It is just a little way now, and he can see the front gable of Floki’s house, curving out from the side of the hill in a smooth sweep of overlaid boards. It cuts into the woods like his boat cut through the water - in sleek, silent lines, as if it isn’t there - a passing ghost and nothing more.

He leans into the slope, digging his fingers into moss and root and the thin layer of dirt until his nails scratch the rock just below the surface. He grasps his knee with his right hand and hobbles downwards, counting his steps under his breath. The pain expands and contracts with his heartbeat. His head swims in it, dizzy and deafening. It is near fifty paces to reach the beaten path that flows past Floki’s door and his whole leg is shaking from ankle to hip. The pier below seems empty, the little boat sprinkled with a layer of dropped pine needles. He staggers onward. It is a while before he realises he is breathing out words as he goes - repeated, whispered supplications. “Please. Please.” But there is no smoke curling from the slitted smoke holes in the layered roof, and as he rounds the long eaves, grasping at the edge of the curved beam, he finds that the door is shut.

Athelstan collapses against the beam, frustration itching up his spine. There have been too many delays already, but there are too many miles of woods to go searching, so here he is, forced to wait for Floki to finish his day’s work and return. But since Floki is as like to kill him outside as in… He pushes himself across the gap, stumbles shoulder-first against the door and grabs at the latch, mostly to keep himself upright. The door rattles on its hinges, the latch rattles against the lock inside and the door remains stubbornly closed. There is, from within, the familiar silence that comes with the emptiness of a place. It is a waiting, stagnant hush.

Athelstan shuts his eyes and drops his forehead to the door. His heart has slid up into his shoulder - thumping, thumping. There is a smell coming from inside, something sweet and sick and rotten. Floki forgot something before he left with Ragnar, left and did not return.

“I have asked for so little,” he mutters into the wood. “You could not have granted just this one thing?” The answering quiet is heavy and oppressive and Athelstan attempts to shrug it off with a physical movement, but it just seeps in deeper. He rattles the door again, growling out a noise of anger that sounds, even to his own ears, like the impotent posturing of a pup drowning out its own fear. Floki isn’t here. And Athelstan cannot go any further, not today. Today, he needs rest and medicine and food, all of which is on the other side of the door. He tries again. The wooden latch batters against the iron holdings but will not slide loose. And now anger gives way to something cold and solid in the centre of Athelstan’s chest. “Well if I’m to stay the night, I will not be staying out here.” He slips the axe from his belt.


	20. Chapter 20

“’Let me speak, in truth, of my life,’” Athelstan slurs at the room. Dangling from a ceiling beam, a string of dried fish stare at him with singular, curious eyes. They have not remarked, he notes, on their missing companion. He tips his empty cup at them in salutation, unbalances himself in the process, and slumps sideways against the uneven hearthstones which guard the smouldering beginnings of a fire. A tiny, silent flame crowns the first small twigs now, sitting in the blackened centre of the hearth. Athelstan leans his elbow on one stone - worn smooth and dimpled in the centre - and reaches in across himself, layering on the larger firewood into a tall, pointed structure. It’s a somewhat lax attempt at the shape Bjorn built when they came out of the river, one that will grow up hot and fast, and Athelstan waits for it to take hold with his chin on his hand.

“What was I saying?” he mutters, and his head wobbles up and down with the movement of his jaw, fissures of pain cracking through his cheek. “Oh yes, ‘Let me speak, in truth, of my life.’” The small mead barrel, balanced on two wider hearthstones, has just enough room to fit the cup through the mouth of the half-pried lid, if he does not mind the scratches from the splintered lip or the protruding iron nails. He doesn’t. Athelstan sips with the right side of his mouth but the mead still burns as it goes down - lighting a swathe of fire on lip and cheek and tongue. “’Tell of toilsome days of travel, days suffering heartship’… no,” he chuckles, wagging a finger in the air. He takes another swig and coughs. “No, ‘ _hard_ ship… bitterness of…’ of something. What was the rest, Cenwulf?” Athelstan taps the cup’s horn rim against his forehead. It’s cool and smooth, like a shard of ice. “Cenwulf, Cenwulf.” He tongues at the mead’s sweet aftertaste. “Cenwulf is in the water. That was a good trick, Floki, was it not?”

That memory hurts even through his swimming drunkenness and Athelstan draws a sharp breath to keep the tears back. He stumbles to his feet and begins another rambling circuit of the small house. Beneath his shoes, fragments of the shattered wooden lock-housing crunch like settled snow and he smiles at the noise, though it is a pained, humourless twist. The hacked edge of the door, swung ajar on its hinge, seems to form its own staring eye with the flaring daylight, the eyebrow of the roof raised above it in a deep curve so that the house itself seems to sit in shocked judgement of him.

By the door, the strange netting hangs from wall and partition, laid with furs and pillow in the manner of a bed. Athelstan pushes it and it sets to swinging, side to side, side to side, like the rocking of a boat. On its next return, he snatches one of the furs out and winds it over his shoulder in place of his abandoned cloak. Floki’s house, built east-facing into the rocky hill, remains chill as the overhang they spent the storm in, cold as the chapel on a winter night. Athelstan has been shaking since the snow and the mead isn’t warming him, though he drains the cup again anyway, just in case.

He staggers on round, clutching the fur around his shoulders and the empty cup to his chest. Behind the part wall that breaks the inner living space from the outer, there is a thin pile of furs laid on a low bed. Behind, one cup and one bowl, one threadbare blanket and a much-mended grey shift; things a slave might be allowed to keep as their own, though Athelstan has seen no other sign of one. Past that is Floki’s big bed and this Athelstan drops down on, flopping flat on his back between the half-drawn curtains and kicking his heels in against the boards. Dust floats up, twinkling in the meagre twilight, swirling on unfelt winds like birds of prey in a far sky, and Athelstan shuts his eyes and breathes in the smell of the herb-sweetened hay in Floki’s mattress. Riding on the end of that there is again a note of sickliness, of something dead and rotting.

Athelstan's body throbs but he doesn't move, only lies there quaking. "Me," he whispers, "it is me rotting." There is - now that he can differentiate between rain and ice and blood, between this pain and that pain - a distinct sensation at the back of his left shoulder of something warm and wet and porridge-sticky, emanating from a hard, hot knot of flesh. “How long now, Eldwyn?” A few days, perhaps? And he is too weak to walk on, too weak to walk back. He will die, then Gyda will die, and Bjorn will try for Kattegat and be killed along the way. Or - miracle of miracles - Gyda might recover, and they will both starve to death over winter, trapped by the river. Athelstan’s rottenness is a gift to everyone now.

When he opens his eyes again the world spins. It smudges and whirls as if underwater and of a sudden, where there were none before, there are faces. They are grotesque, mocking faces, all tooth and tongue and huge, wild eyes. There are devils in the roof, come to drag him down to hell. Athelstan cries out and scrambles away, his body an uncoordinated collection of elbows and feet, tangling in the fur and the blankets and the curtain, while the faces loom over him, cackling out Floki’s voice.

“No! Wait!” Athelstan falls off the bed, landing with a thump against the boards, Floki’s blankets twisted around one ankle. He throws his arm over his head in a futile attempt to shield himself. Silence settles down over him like drifting snow. Nothing happens. Peeking out from beneath his sleeve like a child hiding from monsters, he watches the faces recede back into the roof and blinks. On the rafters, the carvings stretch in a long, ugly sequence from one side of the roof to the other, a pair of antlers at each end dripping with ribbons of cloth. These Northmen - and Athelstan makes a scoffing noise only for himself, his heart slowing back into a steady beat - they think they can nail blessings to their walls as a man hangs a tapestry but it is a stupid, useless vanity. Where was Ragnar’s blessing when his farm was washed away? His crops, his animals, his every possession? His children? Where were his gods then?

Where was _yours_?

"I—" he chokes. The fish twist on their string, the door gazes at him, the fire crackles. Floki’s house is as hostile and mind-muddled as its master. “Leave me alone,” he tells it. There is not mead enough in the world for the thoughts that jumble through his mind now. Elbows and feet and a desperate handhold of the unhewn rock wall get him back to his feet again and back to the hearth, tripping over the axe handle on the way. That he picks up by the headless end and tosses onto the fire where it collapses the near half of the structure into a clattering avalanche of flame and spark. The splintered end of the handle melts to black before it catches, then the flames run low and modest up the handle to the mid-mark, where the soaked-in grease of human use and Athelstan’s mead-covered handprint gives a greater fuel and it blazes up in a sudden spurt of blue-edged flame. If Athelstan holds one hand right up to the licking fire, he can feel the beginning of a tingling warmth on his palm. It isn’t enough to ease his shuddering muscles.

This time, the mead barrel slides when Athelstan forces the cup through the gap, slipping across the hearthstones so that the bottom lip hangs over the inside edge. At the bottom of the barrel, the axe head follows the movement with a sloshing thud, and, after a moment of improbable balance, the barrel slides off. Athelstan wrenches his hand back out as it falls, raising the cup aloft out of the way, mead washing over the lip and soaking his hand again. The barrel lands on its side against the hearthstones, its contents soaking into the circle of floor. Athelstan licks the side of his thumb and the mead burns his cheek.

Through the eye of the door, the sunset paints a stripe of orange-gold across the hills. It is late, Athelstan can tell by the feel of the hours more than by the light. The days are ebbing from their midsummer length when the nights wore a disquieting grey for all but the middle hour, but it is still deep into what would be darkness back in England and this Norse sun is late to bed and early rising.

Athelstan wanders over to the door and draws it fully open, sitting himself down on the threshold with his legs through onto the lower ground of the porch. The sun tilts on the ridge behind the house like a board on a thin wedge and as it slips further down, the stripe of its thrown colour ripples up over the wooded eastern bank. Athelstan leans against the door frame and pulls the fur tighter about his juddering shoulders. It feels like a last embrace.

“Remind me of the rest, Cenwulf.” There are phrases in the poem that he recalls, about loneliness and suffering and exile, and something at the end about God. There is always something about God. “But you cannot tell me. You are dead. And so will I be, soon enough.” Cenwulf bobs in the fjord, his bloated face glaring up at the sun, waiting for a crow to peck his eyes out. Leppa and Bregwald turn to leather in the sun. Athelstan will make a rotten corpse in comparison, though there is some certain petty pleasure in the idea of decaying on Floki’s best bed.

The mead does not burn any longer, it slips down smooth as spring water, and warmth prickles in his cheeks and down his neck. But maybe that is the fever. Athelstan pulls his elbows in against himself, knocking his belt. Rannveyg’s utility knife hangs by his hip, the keys to Ragnar’s house jangle near the rope’s knot and at that, Athelstan laughs - tilting his chin to his chest and screwing his eyes shut, quiet and wheezing - until tears leak down his cheeks, sticky and hot. “I kept your keys for you, Ragnar. If only your door was still there.” He laughs again, while the cast sunset burns out across the river valley and the sky bleeds a cold, dark blue upwards from the eastern horizon. The birds take up the night chorus, singing the light away in their own instinctive Vespers. Athelstan presses his head against the door frame, and the birds' cacophony buzzes between his ears as if his skull is a cage they are trapped within. He cannot go on any longer. Even if he could, how is he to know which direction in this wide world he should go to find help now? Everyone he knows is in Kattegat - a river and a coast and fjord away. Athelstan taps his head on the frame and realisation comes in a long, slow thought. Floki has a boat.

***

Down the sloping path, down the worn wooden treads set into the dirt, Floki’s workshop sits as a dark shell beside the covered pier. Inside is a half-built wooden chest, the upside-down skeleton of a new fishing boat, and a single wooden post carved with the first rough shapes of a spiralling snake. Past that, as Athelstan stumbles on - slow and clumsy at putting one foot in front of the other - he trips over a pile of clothing at the land end of the pier. He stops, braces one hand on a pier post and prods at the pile with his right foot, wincing. A pair of shoes, a belt, a plain grey shift, all cast off and dropped in place in the way someone might if they were undressing to swim. But the clothes, like Floki’s boat, are covered in a thick layer of dropped pine needles. By the end of summer, it will all be absorbed into the newest ground layer. Whoever left them is not coming back.

The river, sparkling blue in the day, has muted to a solid, unburnished grey in the late evening twilight. Its rippling movement covers the surface from bank to bank with black wrinkles supple as well-used linen. It is wide and fast and straight, and in the hazy distance to the southeast, the gaping maw of it slides out past eastern woods and western cliff to spit out into the wide grey sea. At such a distance, and in the gloom of approaching dark, the swells are unmeasurable. This is a doomed voyage, a doomed oath he gave to Ragnar all those weeks ago, and once again Athelstan considers the merits of going back inside and dying in the warmth of Floki’s bed. It will be the last time he has any comfort. But instead, he drains his cup a final time and drops it by the pile of clothing.

“I might see you at the bottom of the river,” he says, though he expects to get at least as far as the sea before he drowns, and he tugs the fur from his shoulders and drops it into the boat.

Launching it, however, is no small task. Bracing with his rotten shoulder and his whole leg sends such a bolt of agony through him that his vision flashes white and he wakes up on the ground, curled up in the hollow beneath the boat’s stern, convinced he has been struck by lightning again. But he crawls out to a clear sky, shaky and moaning - because… well, who is going to hear him? - and attempts it the other way, with his right shoulder and bitten leg. Pushing on that leaves him gasping and gagging, doubled over the pointed stern, the familiar sensation of flowing blood sticky down the side of his knee. Athelstan wheezes, spitting out a mouthful of honey-sweet bile onto the ground beside the keel’s dark furrow. Floki’s two-oared boat is much lighter than Ragnar’s faering at least, so he grits his teeth and pushes again.

The moment the current catches the front of the boat, the river pulls it out as if it is feather-light, like one of Bjorn’s leaf boats. Athelstan grabs at the side and the wood scrapes through his hands, burning his skin. His wading chase, dragging his right leg through the water, is not fast enough. A few more steps and it will be gone and riverbed sinks beneath him - the water up to his shins, then his knees. Out of pure desperation, Athelstan throws himself headfirst over the side. He falls more than he climbs in, toppling sideways and backwards and ending with his head under the centre thwart and his legs crooked over the side. The boat rocks back and forth in a long, violent swaying, mimicking Athelstan’s revolving head, the horizon of the wooded banks dipping in and out of sight. But it settles as it slips further out into the main run. The trees slip away from the edge of the sky and Athelstan, still lying in the middle of the boat, his head in cold water up to his ears, picks out the silver-gold specks of stars in the deep blue night sky. The river gurgles but it also seems to carry a distant hum - high and whispering - that comes and goes with the winking lights above. The stars are singing.

He sits up, eventually, dragging his feet in over the edge of the boat and crawling onto the aft-thwart by the steerboard. Unlashing the steering oar takes more working arms than he has, so Athelstan cuts through the rope with his knife instead, letting the oar drop down into the water and pointing the little boat down the river’s broad centre. A cutting breeze sweeps against his back and through his wet clothing, and Athelstan wraps the damp fur about his shoulders again, cinching it tight around his neck. It is not an icy wind, not like the coming storm on the ridge, or the blown snow on the mountain-top, but it carries the chill of a looming winter all the same.

Water laps about in the keel, licking up at the topmost rivets of the keelboards, and Athelstan twists askew so that he can wedge his heels up on the strake above. From this vantage point, away from the rocky ridge and the crowning forest, the view upriver is a clear straight run northwest. If Athelstan squints against the gloom it is possible to see the faint edge of snow-capped mountains drawing across the far horizon, their tops pricking the stars from the sky. Closer, the Ram’s Horns slip past and away northwards, chasing the far mountains and the edge of Floki’s pine forest, where a light flickers.

Athelstan leans over the steerboard, heels scraping down the strakes and plashing back into the water. “Floki?” Yet it is not the small, here-and-gone flashing of a lamp through the trees, but a brighter yellow-orange glow more akin to a hearth fire. And it grows, as the boat slips further and further downriver, from the shapeless mimicry of a sunset to the roiling, many-layered red of molten iron framed by the perfect rectangle of Floki’s open door.

Athelstan forgot to douse the fire.

A pall of smoke floats above the roof. Athelstan kneels up on the strake, plunging one foot back up to the ankle into the water sluicing about the keel. A confusing mixture of guilt and glee, anxiety and fascination spins through his mind as the flames begin to lick at the top of the doorway - now no larger than Athelstan's outstretched thumb. It blurs at the edges and bright cracks of flame flash between the boarded walls. He watched the priory burn this way, fading into obscurity even as the roof shuddered and then collapsed onto the raging fire in absolute silence. Guilt comes not for that destruction, but for the worrisome possibility of catching the forest on fire, allayed only a little by the fresh memory of drooping, rain-laden branches. But he tears his gaze away and turns back around, putting his back to the fire with a stiff shrug. There is nothing to be done about that now. His right leg cramps on straightening and Athelstan hisses, bending over it. It isn't until his foot hits the keel, water pooling up to his shin, that Athelstan notices the whole boat is a-tilt. Then the top of the bow kisses the water and the river rushes in over the sides. And he realises - now, stupidly, now that it's much too late - that there was a reason other than leaving that Floki pulled the boat ashore. He has time to know, with the blunt impact that knowledge has, that he won't be able to swim this time, before he is plunged once again into the black.


	21. Chapter 21

It’s surprising to blink his eyes open to grey-smudged morning and the sting of a drizzling rain pattering down on his face. His mouth tastes of sand and old leather, the inside of his throat swollen and scratchy, as if someone has run it across a carpenter’s lathe and packed it with splinters. He coughs, dislodging something that scrapes up along the flesh behind his tongue. He coughs again and cannot stop, his chest rattling, and the cough soon becomes a violent hacking that breaks loose the thick clots of blood in his cheek and spatters them out onto the ground. Athelstan struggles up from his back on one trembling elbow and flops over forwards instead, his body too heavy to control, his head folding down on a boneless neck to squelch into the muddy bank. Water bubbles up around his mouth and he claws at it, fisting one useless handful of sloppy soil, spasming with each cough until the river water expels itself in a violent stream from nose and mouth, smeared red and flecked with silt. The rain trickles down his cheek to join the mess, washing streaks of blood down the bank.

“So you are alive, then. I wasn’t sure.”

Athelstan isn’t sure either, not yet. He releases his cramped fingers, the handful of cold, smooth mud dripping out from between them. “Who are you?” he rasps and mud slips back in between his lips, coating his front teeth. The voice isn’t like anyone he knows and he finds it a strange thing, that in his death he would imagine a stranger. The sucking sound of boots in mud makes him turn, twisting his head to the right and squinting up from beneath the hair plastered across his forehead, streaming water. He has a loud imagination too, it seems.

“My name is Ulfkell. I am the man whose land you are dripping on.”

The boots are real enough. So close to Athelstan’s face, the waxed stitches squeak. And when Ulfkell steps back again - not to kick him, as Athelstan first suspects, but for more room to edge his sax from its sheath, metal snicking against leather - his footprint pools with rainwater. Athelstan blinks up at him through the misting sky. Where Ulfkell stands beneath the vaulting branches of scattered birch trees, the shadows fall in patterns on the dome of his clean-shaven head, odd in that they do not move when the branches do, dancing under the drumbeat of the rain that collects in silver drops on his long black beard. This is no strange death after all but a real person on a real shore. Athelstan gets up on his knees - Ulfkell taking another careful half-step backwards - leaving a mangled form of himself still curled on the ground. To his left, the shore is cocooned in birches and above them the grey sky carries the smudge of a darker cloud only noticeable because he is looking for it. To his right, the river flows wider, stretching out to fill the space between the opposing promontory and this receding bank, which - if Athelstan guesses his place right - marks the beginning of its circle round in its own projection into the sea. It seems, whether by luck or by design, that the river spat him out onto the very last piece of clear shore.

He takes a short breath, speckled with the forest-floor taste of long-damp firewood. “I need your help.” Speaking disturbs something foreign in Athelstan’s chest this time and starts another fit of coughing. Somehow it is worse than the first, his muscles squeezing in with such a punching force that it feels as if his ribs will crack at each jolt, that his lungs are turning inside out and climbing up his throat.

“Why should I care what you need?” Ulfkell raises his voice over Athelstan’s hacking. He goes quiet as Athelstan vomits up more silt-flecked water, then says, “If you have finished spewing up my river water, you can put your back to my holdings and begin walking.”

Athelstan catches his breath, wiping the spittle from his mouth with the back of a muddy hand. From the very beginning, everything has gone so wrong that he cannot summon up any surprise at this hostile reception, but his mind is too much a-muddle to find his way out of it. He is not talented at game-playing and Ragnar’s style of conversational manipulation.

Ulfkell stands on the edge of the straggly summer grass now, where it bleeds into the bare earth. His eyes are a sweeping brown, bright and cutting, set in a thin, angular face that could just as easily be carved from rough, cold stone as human flesh. And his eyes are slitted, along with his mouth, into a fearsome scowl. Above the deceptive slump of his shoulders his neck muscles are pulled taut, betraying a tension not visible beneath the layers of tunic and overtunic. He is a predator and Athelstan, shivering and dripping on the ground, is most definitely the prey.

“Courage,” he breathes. He cannot cower and show his underbelly this time, not like he did that day in the chapel in the face of Ragnar’s silent, easy intimidation. There is more at stake now than a book, more than his life only.

It is a slow and staggering rising, getting to his feet. His right leg is seized stiff and Athelstan helps it straight with both hands wrapped around the knee, suppressing groans that reverberate in his chest with a captured and in-held breath. Once planted, he blinks through tear-blurred sight at his own feet, stripped of shoes and socks and bruised to black and blue by the river. He must have fought to live as he did the first time, as Rannveyg did and failed, but he doesn’t remember a thing of it.

Coughing out a lingering lump at the back of his throat, controlled this time, he peers up the slope through the veil of his sodden hair. “I belong to a man named Ragnar Lothbrok. He put his children in my charge, but now his daughter is very sick. We have no medicine and very little food left.” There is so much to say, but he settles in the end with, “Please. She needs help, or she will die. They both will.”

Ulfkell sweeps his sax up, gesturing the point towards Athelstan, who takes a stumbling step back into the edge of the water, lifting his hands in supplication. Ulfkell sneers and sweeps the blade up in a continuance of the same arc to scratch at the side of his head. The shadows wrinkle with his skin and they are not shadows at all but a faded blue tattoo. "And he is incapable of fetching a healer?"

“He is in Kattegat,” Athelstan keeps one palm up and points his other hand at the towering cliffs of the western bank that stand in the way. “And our river is in flood. We cannot cross." His message is jumbled, the pieces all knocked awry and anger grows in his chest at his inability to think coherently. "We simply need to get back. And some aid and shelter until we can. We have been looking but have found no one else."

"Then the Fates have spoken," Ulfkell says without a moment’s pause, and gives an easy shrug. “Perhaps they will be reunited come Ragnarok. Strike northeast and you will find a trail that takes you to the nearest town. It's a three-day walk if you keep a good pace. Don't wander too far west, the marshes will do quicker work than the river." And he spins on his heel and starts tramping up towards the crown of the hill, his boots slopping through the saturated grass.

No. Athelstan shakes his head. The world flips upside down and back again and Ulfkell is almost to the top of the low summit. Athelstan hobbles after him, too fast for his leg which awakens with a sudden throbbing agony. “Wait,” he gasps, and he is too busy breathing to keep in the guttural response to each stabbing pain. “Please.”

“Are you going to walk away on your own two feet, or crawl away with none?” Ulfkell calls out, not turning. The shining blade of his sax rests across his shoulder and he marks his words by tapping the flat of it against the wool of his overtunic - a quiet _pat pat_ that almost melds into the noise of the rain.

“Please. I have come so far—”

“Then you can go further.”

“I climbed a mountain.” Athelstan trips his way up through the grass, catching his toes on the solid rootball of every clump. “I fought a wolf.”

“Were eaten by one, you mean. Chewed up and spat back out.”

“You must… help!”

“Must,” Ulfkell grunts, and disappears over the brow of the hill.

Athelstan’s heart is thunderous as Ragnar’s waterfall. He presses a hand to the centre of his chest and his wheezing breath shivers through his ribs and into his fingertips. He digs the heel in, as if he can squash away the ache, and staggers on. The world spins on a point like a wheel so that now the sky is the ground and the grass is above him, dripping down in wavering fronds, and Athelstan loses his footing in the grey clouds and falls against a tree. He winds his arm about it, lying his head down on the smooth white bark, his fingers beneath his cheek digging in a spasmed claw. The tree flips to one side then the other, then swings from its canopy in ever-decreasing arcs until it finds an upright equilibrium with Athelstan’s feet balanced on a protruding root. Everything settles into place again but Athelstan is left with the nauseating sensation of a long fall interrupted by a sudden stop.

In the bowl of the hill below him, a single longhouse sits amid a sprawl of outbuildings - storage sheds and stables and a henhouse - all encircled by the woods except on the northern edge. There a rough log-and-board boundary fence divides the puddled yard from field and garden and grassland beyond, where more fencing stakes out several folds that might usually take a glut of goats and cows or horses, but that are- so far as Athelstan’s untrustworthy vision is concerned - mostly empty. There is a suggestion of two lumbering red beasts in the furthest square but nothing else. After that, the land rises up into heath and, by all accounts, no other human life between here and the town three days’ walk away.

Athelstan pushes off down the little dirt path, following Ulfkell’s deep footprints in the soggy earth between the clustering trees and to the edge of the yard. The longhouse wobbles on its side and Athelstan grabs at the top of a fence stake just as a long-haired, short-legged little dog trots out from behind one of the stables, yapping around Ulfkell’s feet. Its colour seems to be an indiscriminate shade of mud.

“You will be rewarded,” Athelstan says.

Uflkell’s whole body stiffens. Did he expect Athelstan to leave? Or has Athelstan made a mistake with his words again? “I am no more in need of your poor farmer’s copper kettle than I am of his fool slave’s forsaken errand over mountains and rivers.”

“No copper. He has gold,” Athelstan hopes, and tries not to think of what he is really hoping, “and plenty of it.”

This time, Ulfkell does not answer. Instead, he falls to his tasks about the yard - tidying an already tidy butchering bench, wiping clean the blade of his already clean utility knife.

Athelstan slumps against the creaking fence post, folding his left arm in against his chest to rest his throbbing shoulder, and determines to out-wait Ulfkell the way he has Bjorn so many times during his tantrums, such as the time that he promised to make a messy sacrifice of Athelstan in the yard, or his several attempts to kick Athelstan down the well. But thoughts of Bjorn lead to thoughts of Frodi frozen bloody in the snow and of the boy’s panicked face at Gyda’s sudden illness, and it is all Athelstan can do to swallow down the thick promise of tears instead. He wipes his eyes clear of what might be rain or sweat, passing river-wrinkled fingers over skin that is both boiling and clammy. He is wrung out like a rag. There is nothing left.

After a time, he is startled by the cackling honk of a herring gull, pacing up and down the roof of a stable on fat legs the colour of unripe raspberries. The stable is new, built of bright yellow boards right up against the side of the longhouse, but that too is empty, the door standing open to the yard and Athelstan watches the little dog run in and out of it, chasing shadows under the watchful eye of the lurking gull.

“You are insistent then?” Ulfkell looks over his shoulder at Athelstan, a deep frown curving down into the coarse hairs of his beard.

Athelstan grips the fence post and straightens as much as is possible. Where else is he to go? What else is he to do? “I am.”

“And this is all truth you have spoken?”

“I do not lie.”

Ulfkell quirks a brow at that but finally gestures Athelstan to follow him into the longhouse. Inside, it is much the same as Ragnar's. Past the wattle partition, it extends on in a long, thin space packed with sleeping benches and overhanging shelves on both sides of the raised, square hearth. The side door opens to the south, though the opening is blocked with a tanning rack that has been dragged in from the rain, the feet of the frame clogged with mud. There is no larger bed here - the trestle table takes up that space - and no bunks, but the door to the loft at the back opens straight out into the main living space and a short ladder has been laid up to it. 

“You won’t find much in there. No use prying. We will be slaughtering all that’s left this Bloodmonth.”

“We?” There is no sign of a female presence here - no marital bed, no loom, no flowers strewn in the unswept and untidy rushes. Athelstan limps closer to the fire, his feet taking him on a familiar path around the partition to the centre of the left bench. Here, of course, that space on the bench is not 'his' space, where he sits trading stories with Gyda in the evenings, and he does not dare sit without permission. And also, if he is honest with himself, out of fear that he will never be able to get back up again. “How are we to get back across your river? Do you have a boat?”

“No.” At the opposite bench, Ulfkell sweeps the pine mattress and blankets into a lump against the wall and tugs a board free, dropping it by his feet. “I have a rope bridge if it’s still there. Now, I suppose if you are to drag me back the way you came I had best feed you first. There’s stew in the pot.” He delves an arm inside the storage space, tugging out a leather pack. He does not speak again until Athelstan is occupied, bent over the pot that sits on the hearthstones and stirring up the cold lumps into something resembling food. “All slaves lie,” Ulfkell remarks then. “All men lie, as a matter of fact. It is only a question of what they consider worth lying for. Power, position, land, women, gold.” The board thuds back into place. “Life. Most will lie for life, especially their own.”

Athelstan glances up. “I don’t—” His face hits the rushes with a stunning crack, blood flooding out of his nose. The room flashes black and white to the pain in his eye. He plants his hands on the floor and tries to push himself up despite the screaming protest of his shoulder but the rushes twist into spiralling lines and drop him down again, his head spinning.

“Stay down,” Ulfkell says, quiet.

“I don’t—” understand. “Why—” is he on the floor? Athelstan puts a hand to his eye, grasping the swelling pain with his palm, and tugs at the lip of the nearest bench with the other.

“Stay,” and Ulfkell steps forward and grinds the heel of his boot into Athelstan’s right knee, “down.”

Athelstan gasps a wordless cry and collapses inwards. It hurts! Oh God, it hurts! He curls into a ball, grabbing at his knee with both hands as if he can shield himself from the pain. “Please, I don’t—”

Ulfkell leans over him, his face huge and blurred by Athelstan’s tears, and presses his knife to Athelstan’s throat.

“No. No!”

There is a sharp pressure, a snap, and something glints golden in the air between them. Athelstan’s cross slithers across his chest and thumps to the floor. He grabs for it, much too slow, and it slips down between the rushes and disappears.

“Now this is a very pretty trinket.” Ulfkell rubs his thumb over the face of Gyda’s amulet, holding it up to the light of the fire and turning it this way and that. It glistens red and gold as the flames themselves, like treasure and blood. “Tell me, Wolf, what did you do with the pretty woman who went with it?”

Athelstan shakes his head. “It is Gyda’s. She gave it to me, for protection.”

Ulfkell sighs and digs his heel in again, this time prodding it back and forth along the wound until he finds the most tender part and Athelstan’s gasps become frantic and whimpering, squirming - to his shame he knows it - like a worm on a hook. And in his wriggling he turns himself sideways between bench and hearth, his feet shoved against the wood, his head against the stones.

“Now is that likely enough that I would believe it? You stole it, sure enough. I just wonder whether you simply took it, or whether you did rape and murder to get it.”

“No.” Athelstan digs his fingers beneath Ulfkell’s boot, trying to push him off. “She gave it.”

“You must think me gullible as a wide-eyed child. There are wolves in these parts, certainly, but they are not the four-footed kind, and they shall not find me easy prey.”

“Please.”

“’Please’,” Ulfkell mocks, his eyes shining bronze in the firelight. “I gave you a chance to walk away, slave. I gave you a chance to admit truth. But you insisted on your course and now here you are. You thought to season your lies with enough truth to bait me. ‘I belong to Ragnar Lothbrok', you said. Well, I know of Ragnar Lothbrok.” He makes a sound of disgust and spits on the fire. The flames hiss. “And I know that he is outlaw.” Then he grabs a fistful of Athelstan’s hair and smashes his head back onto the stones.


	22. Chapter 22

Moonlight breaks over the priory wall in bright beams, silvering the edges of Eldwyn’s flowers. Athelstan licks the breeze-driven salt from his lips and slaps the nodding head of a black-gowned poppy. The petals sweep across his fingertips, rabbit-ear soft, and it bows in obeisance just as the bell begins ringing for Night Office. Athelstan hugs his knees to his chest, hands lost somewhere in the folds of his tunic, and watches the poppy nod… nod… nod. Clouds drift across the face of the moon. The sea is sprinkled with lights, like myriad Mass candles, and across the water the shadow of the mainland stretches eastward and seems to pass his little island like an embracing arm. If he had a boat… The bell comes to a stop with a final, sonorous note, leaving the shadow of a noise echoing in his aching head. He presses his feet further down into the chill soil, marking two defiant footprints on either side of Eldwyn’s favourite rose - the solid outlines of ten small toes in the crumbling earth.

“I hate it here,” he confides to the flowers with a hitching, shameful half-sob, “I want to go home.” In the face of the breeze, the poppy continues its vague answering nod, like a man who agrees without really listening, and Athelstan scrubs his swollen eyes with the back of his hand, sniffing down a slimy lump of snot. “I _hate_ it here!” But he doesn’t have a home any more, he’s not stupid enough to believe anything Sigeric says.

“This is your home now, boy,” the Novice-master always lectures him, glaring down his ugly, flat nose at the top of Athelstan’s head. “We are your family now, under God…”

“’…that is why we are called ‘brothers’.’” Athelstan mimics, screwing up his face up into an expression that feels as hateful as his heart does - a twisted, aching canker twined around his breastbone. Athelstan rips up a handful of something beside him and tosses it out onto the path between the cultivated rows, roots and all. “You’re not my brothers. You’re _not_. I already have brothers and they’re not old and stupid and _fat_ like you!” And those are not tears dripping down his face, over his dirty chin, stinging the scratch on his ear lobe where the priory cat slapped him with claws out. He has no home, he was taken from it, and now everyone in it is gone.

_His head pounds._

In the dusty dark between the moonbeams the poppy bows, slipping into deep shadow and dissolving. Athelstan gulps down a mouthful of nothing, dry as sawdust. In the back of his skull, hammer hits anvil with a sparking _thud thud thud_ and stickiness seeps out warm into his hair. He raises a hand, intending to probe at it, and the other is tugged with, his wrists wrapped in a familiar scratching discomfort. The rope fetters are pulled tight against his skin, binding his hands as if for prayer. He blinks at the bobbing dark, swallowing down vinegar sickness, but only one eye moves. His right is an over-ripe damson, leaking sweetness down his swollen cheek, squeezed to near bursting by the bone of his eye socket. He feels around the tender edge of it with cautious fingers, catches the edge of a deep bruise and hisses on an indrawn breath.

“Cenwulf?” But there is no comforting press of a shoulder against his, and there is no response to his rasping whisper. Athelstan makes a noise of vague confusion in the back of his throat. “Ragnar Lothbrok?” He brings one foot up, intending to turn and peer around the mast, except that his bare heel hits, not the smoothed boards of Ragnar’s boat, but dry, packed earth overlaid with prickling straw. “Oh.” And he sags back against the wood behind him, the smooth surface of a wall made of new-smelling boards.

He does not recall Ragnar returning home, but his memory now is a swimming, swirling thing, flashing up only pieces of things that might have gone before. There is the ewe, boneless and broken, there is Bjorn’s promise of a beating, but the punishment itself is only a dream made of panic and an expressionless, looming face. Athelstan swipes his tongue across his lip, pulling off a lump of tacky blood and starting up again the sharp tang of fresh iron in his mouth. He is thirsty and sore, but he isn’t dead. And Ragnar will have to let him out soon; Athelstan left the chores half done.

_His head pounds._

“You cannot sleep either?”

Athelstan's heart stutters and he drops his knife which lands in the bowl of dried peas and knocks everything to the floor. There is a prolonged, awful noise of scattering as they roll everywhere: across the wooden floor, down into the gaps between the floorboards, into the space beneath the workbench where the mice scratch during the quietest hours. Hot panic floods up through Athelstan's chest, sudden and unstoppable as an over-boiling pot. The rational part of him - buried deep beneath memories of seeping blood - knows that it's only peas, only Gyda, that Ragnar is a wide sea away from here _._ It is ridiculous to be afraid - and afraid of what? - yet afraid he is. One blackened pea pod rasps in his clenched fist. Is this what Leppa and Bregwald look like, drying under the sun in Kattegat? Athelstan’s frozen muscles shudder, breaking into movement as crackling river ice, and begin to shake in violent symphony.

Gyda stands wide-eyed and still, moonlight frosting her already pale forehead. She is small and silent at the best of times, but eerie now in the night's strange quiet. It should be filled with the noise of slumbering men, with the plash of waves against the shore below, and the ringing of the night bell calling him to chapel. Instead, there is only Bjorn's sleepy grumbling, the occasional screech of the fox that woke him and the river's poor imitation of home. And now Gyda's patting footsteps crossing the warm floorboards, ten little toes peeping out from beneath the long skirts of her shift. She passes the hearth, drops to her knees, rights the bowl and begins plucking up the scattered peas with quick, deft movements.

“What is England like?” she asks, pinching out a pea from a cranny between bench and floor. “Is it like here?”

Words will not fit through the strangling tightness of his throat. Athelstan fights the urge to tug at the weight of a rope that is no longer there. He clears his throat. “A little,” he manages, then with a shake of his head, “and not at all.” Gyda sits back on her heels, squinting up at him, and Athelstan wonders if he spoke in English again, or fumbled his Norse for the hundredth time. Often, his tongue is too cumbersome to articulate his thoughts.

In her curled hand, a small collection of peas rattles together like tiny bones. "Tell me about your world, then. And I will tell of mine."

_His head pounds._

Athelstan wets cracked lips and wishes for water, imagining the cold slip of it down his parched throat. The sea cracks against the hull of Ragnar’s boat, sending up spray that coats everything - from boards to sails and every inch of Athelstan’s exposed skin - with a sticky layer of brine.

The sky is an empty, inky black. Sometimes, between the blank sweep of clouds, there is a glimmering promise of starlight that never appears and Ragnar's boat jolts on rolling, colourless waves, creaking on endlessly towards the unchanging, empty horizon.

“We are in hell,” Cenwulf moaned once, a lifetime ago, “this is our eternity.” And he cried for a while, sobbing through his shivers, but even that has ceased now.

The Northmen snore in their places - laid out across the deck or sitting up against the side of the boat. Even Ragnar, who prowls a circuit every few hours, is tucked now between the water barrels toward the stern, his chin down on his chest, rumbling along to their hollow sloshing.

The madman Floki is the only other awake, his arm slung over the steeringboard up to the pit, caressing the rope that lashes it to its current course. He squints up into the black heavens and chatters to himself with his usual manic lilt. The boat groans over a larger wave then slaps down again into the trough and Athelstan's temple smacks into the mast with a head-ringing thud. When he blinks the resulting mist away, Floki appears without apparent movement, crouched at Athelstan's blue-toed feet, and presses a long finger into the meat of Athelstan's shoulder as if to skewer him with it.

“What do you want, Priest,” and he spits the last, “with your spying? Hmm? Have your own conversation with the Gods if you are so interested.” He scratches at the scruff of hair on his cheek with his other hand.

Athelstan swallows and on his tongue sits the salt air and the warm cattle smell of Floki’s stained leather clothing. “I have,” he says, and has to wet his lips again against the chafing air, “spoken to my God.”

"Your white Christ," Floki sneers, leaning in so close that his thin, twisted lips mimic the sleek rise of the bowhead behind him. He jabs his skeleton fingers into Athelstan's shoulder again, then starts picking at the seam of his scapular, tugging it this way and that with intense concentration, testing it for some unknown property. "And what does he say?" He flicks hollow, black-rimmed eyes to Athelstan's face. In the flat dark of the moonless sea, they puddle blankly in the centre of his face so that he seems a dead thing.

Perhaps Cenwulf was right.

“I… do not know.”

A hysterical giggle bubbles out of Floki’s mouth, flowing from that spring of insanity inside him, and the laughter snorts in and out of his nose too as he moves his prodding fingers onto Athelstan’s neck, tracing the line that Ragnar’s knife took up under his jaw. Athelstan gulps and twitches back, knocking his head again on the bulk of the mast.

“Then you aren’t listening.” Floki’s face is unceasingly animated, whatever his constant stream of thoughts becoming a continuous motion in the muscles of his eyes and jaw. “The Gods are always speaking, but men do not listen to them the way they should. Or,” he laughs again and yanks at Athelstan’s earlobe, stretching it out, wiggling it back and forth, fingernails catching at the sensitive skin, “they listen, only they do not like what they hear.”

Athelstan grimaces and twists sideways until Floki lets go. He wants to protest - he _has_ been listening and God has been silent - but Floki does not seem like someone it is wise to win an argument against. Athelstan bites his tongue.

Floki twitches his head sideways in something approximate to a shrug. “But those are my Gods. Yours is probably deaf. Deaf and dumb. But the Norns have plans for you, Priest. You’ll have to ask them what they are. If you are brave enough to listen to the answer.”

Athelstan shivers awake again, his hands juddering against his knees. The light that filters in now through the chinks in the wall is rosy, blushing Athelstan’s toes a warmer peach. He scrunches them again but they obey only reluctantly. He lays his forehead on his knees and the warmth of his fever seeps through his woollen trousers - still heavy with river damp. He smells - Athelstan sniffs - like the pigs’ fetid water, a nose-wrinkling mix of sweet and sour that hits at the back of the throat on hot days. It is almost enough to cover the buttery musk of male goat that has sunk into the straw bedding, though the little building is empty of anything but him now. He is alone except for a tiny brown mouse, nibbling at some dropped grain in the far corner, its teeth clicking very loudly for such a small creature.

“If this was what the Norns had planned for me, I am glad I did not ask.” He shuts his eyes. The thudding ache in the back of his head revolves like a wheel. Like a spiked wheel, he corrects himself, pushing the pain around and around. In comparison, the aches in the rest of his body - in his face and shoulder and leg, are mere pulses of pressure, all wrapped and smothered in the sticky blanket of his fever. “It is quite possible,” he whispers to himself, or to the air, or to the little twitching mouse, “that I am dying now.”

He opens his eyes again to the clacking of the latch and the door swings open to golden sunlight, dappling the dirt yard beyond Ulfkell’s hulking shadow. The mouse skitters away to some dark safety and Athelstan raises his heavy head with an effort, laying it on the wall behind him. Ulfkell squats down beside him and presses a bowl of steaming porridge into Athelstan’s palms. His fingers won’t bend, they splay outward instead like the petals of a sunflower and the bowl tips on the heels of his hands and falls against his breastbone. Ulfkell smooths his lips flat in an expression of vague annoyance and cups Athelstan’s hands in his, forcing the cold-stiff joints to bend around his handful until it is secure, with Athelstan’s thumbs hooked over one edge. Ulfkell’s hands are large and heavily calloused, the pads of his fingers rough as cracked oak bark but they are hot and when he withdraws them again, sitting back on his heels with his arms slung across his knees, Athelstan misses the warmth.

“Why?” The heat from the bowl begins to seep through to his tingling bones and as the stiffness in his muscles releases he begins shivering again, his elbows thudding periodically against the wall. He manages to sip up a mouthful and chews at it tentatively on the whole side of his face. Molten needles punch through the bone of his jaw.

Ulfkell stares at him with hooded eyes, his irises darkened to chestnut. In answer, he shrugs a shoulder, and the tattoos on that side of his head writhe like living things. “You should make peace with your Gods today, Wolf. You will be going to the Lawspeaker tomorrow.”

The food sticks in Athelstan’s throat.

“He will want to know where your master is hiding,” Ulfkell goes on. “If you speak truthfully, you may earn a quick death. If not, you will be sure to gain a slow one.”

Athelstan coughs, regurgitating the half-swallowed porridge. It squelches under his tongue and stings at the open wounds in his cheek.

“There was no one in the woods here last night. So he waits across the river or north in the marshes if he remains at all. Tell me where to direct my own search and I can save you a journey.

The porridge smells like Gyda’s but it tastes of ash and blood. A three-day walk, Ulfkell said. Athelstan will not survive it anyway. He shakes his head and his hair falls into his stinging eyes. “It is as I said.”

“Then you will meet your Gods alone.” Ulfkell rises.

Athelstan jerks his hands out, toppling the bowl to the floor, and grabs at Ulfkell’s trousers. His fingers stutter shut with difficulty and though his grip isn’t strong, Ulfkell settles into stillness and waits, frowning down at him.

"Her name is Gyda," Athelstan splutters, tripping over his own tongue in his haste to get his words out. "She has had eleven winters. She looks like a willow stick, but she is strong. She can match her brother in a fight and she never complains about hardship." Ulfkell shuffles his leg back a little way as if preparing to take a step and Athelstan tightens his grip as far as he is able and blusters on through Ulfkell's sceptically-raised eyebrow. "She treats her goats as if they are children. In fact, she mothers everyone, including me. Especially me. And she does not deserve to die, afraid, in a strange place, without her mother to hold her as she steps into the afterlife."

Ulfkell studies him for a long while, the frown deepening the creases around his mouth. He stands still for so long that Athelstan’s arms grow weary and begin to tremble with effort instead of cold. It is that movement that seems to jolt Ulfkell into decision and he takes a single, deliberate step back. "That is a better story than the one you first told. I wager you are wishing you had thought of that speech yesterday when I might have been persuaded out of my misgivings." He takes another step back and grabs at the edge of the door. "As I said, speak to your Gods. You will be joining them soon enough."

The door thuds shut behind him, the latch sliding up to rest atop the wooden housing, though it doesn’t quite click shut, and Athelstan is alone again with the remains of his final meal congealing in the straw. He lifts his hands into the dust-glittered light. The rope is a thin, twisted bast, wound round and between his wrists and tugged tight enough that his skin wrinkles up around its edges. The length of it trails down across his beltless tunic and out through a small gap between the boards behind. Athelstan takes up the slack in both hands and tugs. It pulls taut with a sad twang like a badly fired bow. Athelstan gives a few more tugs and feels no more movement. He turns, but his head spins like a top, dropping him to the floor with his hands still clutched about the rope. He lies staring at the ceiling of unhewn beams and the dust motes sparkling in the flitting light until the spinning eases off. Then he slides onto his back, braces his feet against the wall and pulls. The boards creak. His shoulder screams and his hands spasm open. He tries again, panting, clenching his hands tighter against the throbbing pain. He tries until his shoulders run with sweat and his heart thumps hard enough to break out of his chest, but the boards hold and the rope refuses any more give, leaving him a slack of three feet from the wall and a secure knot he has no hope of reaching, somewhere outside. His breath comes in pained staggers.

“I… am not… staying here.” He braces his left foot on the rope between his wrists instead. His shoulder is aflame now, the fire licking up his neck and down his arm. This will hurt. “So…” Athelstan draws another deep breath, then another, hesitating. “ _An, twegen, threo_. Get on with it.” He screws his eyes shut, clenches his teeth and kicks to the rhythm of the numbers in his head. The fire in his shoulder flares up and up and up until it engulfs everything in destructive flame and his head fills with its crackling.

He wakes, still fettered, in a sideways heap, legs tangled up in his arms. The light has moved again, slanting down through the cracks in the east wall to pierce the floor. He unknots himself and his hands drop to his stomach. From wrist to elbow, blood has dried in thin red lines like dribbled candle wax, but the rope is tight as it ever was. In Athelstan's chest, the slow thud of his heart stutters on, aching. Scratching in the far corner heralds the return of the little mouse.

"You should be sleeping," he says, in Norse because it is a Norse mouse. The mouse travels along the base of the wall towards him, its little white-tipped ears swivelling towards him at the heave of his breath, then away again, pitter-pattering on its four tiny feet. It's a small, arrhythmic sound, like a faraway scattering of raindrops shaken from the trees after a storm is done. It is close enough to touch now, but it doesn't seem to mind him. Perhaps it, too, thinks of him as just another animal. It scrabbles about in the straw as it goes, sifting through the stems, picking up this little crumb or that, whatever the goat was too ponderous to retrieve before Ulfkell sold or slaughtered it. And then, beneath its tiny paws, something glints. Athelstan rolls over - the mouse darting away - and picks it out of the straw. He twists it around and around, a small piece of metal, just large enough to grasp between thumb and finger without quite losing sight of it - the snapped-off end of a hacksaw blade.

***

Distant footsteps drift into Athelstan’s river-dream in the tapping of pebbles along a reddening shore. But it is the little dog who wakes him out of it with a scramble of poking feet, jumping out of his lap and tottering off across the yard, tail wagging so hard that the rest of its little body wags with it. The horizon blushes red along the mountains, picking out the Ram’s Horn with a golden line, while the blue sky above it darkens to a deep ocean that foams with stars. Ulfkell looks up at it as he comes through the squeaking gate, muttering to himself. The little dog yips and paws at his legs and one corner of Ulfkell’s severe mouth quirks into a soft smile. He stoops and picks the dog up, laying it along one arm like a babe and scrubbing at the back of its neck.

“What is his name?”

Ulfkell jolts to a stop, his eyes flicking around the yard until they alight on Athelstan, who uncurls from the shadowy corner of the porch and pulls himself to his feet by hanging on to the iron door handle.

“Agni,” Ulfkell says. _Terror_. His hand is crabbed stiff on the dog’s back.

Athelstan cannot help smiling, though it probably looks horrific. He tightens his hold on the door handle, the house revolving with alarming violence.

Ulfkell slips his hand to his sax and looks, without moving his head, as far about him as he can, eyes roaming the visible edges of the woods which are lowering into murky shadow.

“I could have escaped,” Athelstan says, “but I will not, because Gyda needs help. And no matter how you wish me away you are the only person I have found to ask, so I am enmeshed with you just as you are enmeshed with me.” He takes a breath of the warm, evening air but it feels cold in his lungs. “I could have escaped. You must believe me now.”

“I believe that you are a desperate man.” Ulfkell slips his pack to the floor and drops Agni from a foot up, letting him land as he may. Agni trots back over to Athelstan and begins licking his toes with a warm tongue. “And desperate men do desperate things. Your ‘master’ is outlawed, his property confiscated. And so you thought you could lure me away and simply take mine.”

“And why bother with so elaborate a ruse? You are not thinking sensibly.”

Ulfkell throws a hand up, pointing a finger at Athelstan as if to stab him with it. “Lies again. I found the remains of the last dwelling you came across.”

Athelstan swallows. “That was a mistake. An accident.”

"Argue your case with the Lawspeaker, not me. In the end, you will be returned to your Earl - just the same as Ragnar Lothbrok's house and animals and rotting dung heap - for his disposal. In as many pieces as is deemed appropriate." Ulfkell takes several steps forward with a forced ease that only serves to betray the stiffness of his body and the unnatural stillness of his neck.

“You are afraid,” Athelstan blurts out, straightening at the realisation and rattling the door handle.

Ulfkell’s eyes flash anger. “Enough,” he spits.

"You must know by now that there is no trap, no plan, no one else. That I have been alone since the very beginning." The thought chokes him and his eyes sting. For the whole of his life, it has ever been only Athelstan, no matter how Eldwyn tried, until the children. "You could go and prove I tell the truth—"

“Help a slave, for no reward.”

“—but you are _afraid_.” Athelstan raises his voice over Ulfkell’s dismissal. “Of what? What do you imagine I might take? A few meals and a…” Athelstan kicks his bare, bruised heel across the dirt, “…a pair of shoes? That is the price you have put upon the lives of _children_.”

“Be silent, Wolf.” The words groan out between Ulfkell’s teeth like the creaking of a rotting door.

The warning of it - the heralding death - jolts up Athelstan’s spine in a surge of hot-cold terror. But not just terror, anger too, full and heady so that he is almost drunk with it. He swallows the rock that blocks his throat, tightens again his trembling hand on the cold iron handle, and in a clear, quiet voice, he says, “Coward.”

Ulfkell's shoulders slump, but Athelstan does not have time to breathe in the reprieve before his hand flashes out and slams a full fist into Athelstan's temple. The blow knocks him around and into the door, his nose taking the brunt of the impact against the thick planks. He bounces back off again and drops to his knees, stunned, his hand tangled in the door handle, his arm twisted up and back at an unnatural angle. Athelstan shakes his head, trying to clear it, and the horizon stands on end. He straightens up, wobbling on his knees like a child's weighted toy, and struggles to pull his hand free of the ironwork. Ulfkell steps back and kicks him in the stomach. Athelstan's breath explodes out of his body and he drops again to the full length of his twisted arm and dangles there, shoulder and lungs burning. Is this how Leppa felt, slowly dying on the gibbet? Ulfkell kicks him again and stars flash against the woods, the door shakes, Athelstan's hand slips free and he collapses to the earth.

Blood floods the gaps between his teeth and coats his tongue. It spills onto the ground, puddling about his mouth and nose. When he breathes, he breathes in hot, wet clumps of iron earth. The world spins, his head thuds with the sound of a chapel door slamming open against stone. And now the porch gable beams stretch up above him in the evening gloom, still bursting with coloured stars and the faint aura of white light as of the sun bursting through cloud. Athelstan gasps around the bubbling blood in his throat and a sharp pain cuts through his side. He raises an arm, trying to cover his face with this collection of thin, fragile bones and Ulfkell stamps on it, smashing Athelstan’s wrist into his lip. Something small and hard drops to the back of his mouth and he chokes it down. Ulfkell braces his hands on the door, an arch over him, all in shadow, just another part of the building hemming Athelstan’s body into this quiet space. He uses his feet like battering rams against Athelstan’s ribs. It is evening, but Athelstan cannot hear the bird song, all the noise is Ulfkell’s effort-filled grunts and his own gasping groans, slipping on the edge of a whine like a dying animal. This is how Godric died, at the mercy of Rollo’s boots. And later, Bjorn laughed about it. Ulfkell stamps on his leg again, grinding the heel of his boot down onto the swollen lump of the deepest bite and Athelstan cannot help it: he screams.


	23. Chapter 23

Dawn has begun - though the moon is still out, shining its retreating half-face upon the treetops - and in the stable the first glow of sunlight weaves its golden threads through the wattle walls and the open doorway. Athelstan presses himself back into the corner and the dry wattle crackles against the shoulders of his woollen habit but the toes of his sandals still sit in the puddle of light. He squints and ducks his head. The ache pounds full and sick in both temples.

“Bjorn will see to this one, so you’ve no need to touch her,” Ragnar says, plucking another red-leaved beet top from the scrap bucket Athelstan hugs in both arms. Ragnar offers it up to the mare on an open palm, smoothing his other hand down the beast’s long, dappled grey nose. Her lips pucker out and she scoops up the morsel between several yellow teeth, crunching it down.

Athelstan grimaces at the noise, hunching his shoulders and trying in vain to retract his neck like a snail into its shell. This is a mistake because it brings his chin down to scrape the edge of the bucket and Athelstan inhales the pungence of fermenting cabbage from the bottom. He recoils with a murmur of vague horror, swallowing down another piece of his revolving stomach. “What was in that ale?”

Ragnar scratches the mare’s forelocks and cuts Athelstan a sideways glance. One side of his mouth is quirked up in a smirk that has been there since he shook Athelstan into moaning wakefulness. “You English priests do not drink strong ale.”

He calculated, of course, that Athelstan would be easy to get drunk. Athelstan grimaces again. “We do, on some feast days. Only not to excess.” His guilty failure tastes bitter and he drops his eyes. But no amount of wishing will take back what he said, or undo what is about to be done.

“Do not forget your oath while you regret your headache,” Ragnar reminds him.

Athelstan nods and his brain shakes about in his skull like a walnut in its shell. He groans and twists the bucket around in his arms so that he can press a palm into his temple. “Mmhmm,” he manages, “I remember.”

“But you will help Gyda with the goats, they are a lot of milking for only one person so you will need practice if you are to do it alone next summer. _She_ will have the keys then.”

 _Next_ summer. Athelstan blinks at the straw-muddled floor, his stomach dropping into his shoes. Next summer and the next and the next… there is nothing but this now; nothing but this place and these people and the rope that still burns around his neck, even since Ragnar removed it. And the weight of that endless march of days presses down on his lungs until his head turns dizzy. Athelstan takes a desperate breath, short and gasping, but the mare - annoyed at the cessation of beets - whinnies and stamps her hoof on the ground, smothering Athelstan’s grief.

Lagertha calls from the house then and Ragnar steps back from the mare’s stall. He contemplates her for a time, or at least his gaze stops on the dark smudge between her eyes and his lips twist further into something more of pain than of mocking. He begins fidgeting with the little hairs at the edge of his beard. In the blossoming light, they wisp up as strands of gold filigree, the delicate work of some other artist and a strange contrast to the rough _scritch-scratch_ of nails on freshly scrubbed skin.

Eventually, Ragnar shrugs off his thoughts and turns towards the door. “It seems we are ready to leave.” There’s an attempt at lightness there, a shallow covering of the solid tension beneath. Ragnar plants one hand on the wattle wall by the doorway, blocking out a spar of light, and claps the other to Athelstan's neck so that, just for a moment, he is anchored there between them. His touch is heavy-handed, friendly, in the way that he often rewards the hounds for a trick well done - _Good boy -_ but his palm hits higher than usual, knocking Athelstan’s head forward and catching at the ruined skin beneath his hair.

Wit his head reeling, Athelstan has no control over the sharp wince that flashes across his face. He ducks away, breaking the connection between property and master and property, tightening his arms around the bucket of scraps as if it can shield him from anything at all, let alone his own shame or Ragnar’s displeasure. Ragnar frowns and grabs Athelstan back by the hair while he is still in mid-step, pulling him into the solid block of light in the open doorway and yanking his head to one side. Ragnar sifts through the curls at the nape of Athelstan’s neck until he finds the open sore, then he smooths his thumb around the edge of it in a slow, careful circle. It is a small wound, not much to look at Athelstan is sure, and after a brief inspection Ragnar dismisses it accordingly, settling his hand back into place without comment and tugging Athelstan out of the stable and into the yard. A heavy dew coats the ground this morning, and the chickens are running amok behind the longhouse, digging through the sodden grass for fat worms. Athelstan’s neck stings like a nettle rash. It is a small wound, and it will heal over soon, leaving a patch of shiny new skin, but it will never be the same as it was before.

“I expect you to learn well while we are gone,” Ragnar says. He pauses in the centre of the yard and sweeps his gaze from side to side, taking everything in with a long, deep breath. The house is noisy with bustling activity, the hounds awake and restless at the change of routine. “Gyda will help you. And Bjorn,” Ragnar adds, with a twitch of amusement again that Athelstan does not understand.

“How to run a farm? I… know _some_ things, I think.”

Ragnar snorts. “No, Priest. About life.” And he strides off towards the house, leaving Athelstan with his headache and his stinking bucket and his humiliation.

In the east, the sun peeks up from behind the far mountains. A new blaze of gold sweeps across the river valley and across the black opening to the longhouse as Ragnar’s broad back disappears inside. The pounding dizziness in Athelstan’s head redoubles and he flinches his eyes shut.

He opens them again to darkness. The fuzzy shape of a mouse scuttles back and forth to the tilting movement of the packed-dirt floor, working towards Athelstan’s feet. Athelstan searches out his toes in the gloomy distance, grey and bloody and misshapen, scraping his cheek along the ground. In his ear - hard-pressed to the earth - the movement thunders like a waterfall and every inch of him aches as if he has been pounded beneath its rolling foam.

A shudder rolls through him. “’I am a worm and no man.’”

"You are an oath-breaker." Ragnar steps out of the far corner. His leather boots shine newness and when he squats down at Athelstan's head, they creak just a little. The shadows sink into every flaw in Ragnar's care-worn face so that his expressions flicker in unintelligible sequence, though his eyes glitter brightly as a full moon. He sighs, long and heavy, and the grey shadow of his tunic rustles, betraying a heave of his shoulders. "You swore me an oath, Priest. You have not kept it."

“I tried,” Athelstan rasps and his body spasms again, from his feet upwards in an unstoppable wave, forcing a grunt from his throat.

Ragnar leans forward on his toes, boots groaning, and places his hand on the side of Athelstan’s neck. The tips of his fingers slip into Athelstan’s hair - the callouses scratching the edge of the wolf bite - and his thumb sweeps beneath Athelstan’s jaw to rest at the base of his throat where his heartbeat thumps, quick and stuttering. It is gentle enough to be a comforting gesture, except that all Ragnar has to do is squeeze and—

Athelstan swallows and Ragnar’s thumb raises and lowers with the lump in his throat. “Forgive me.”

“What use is forgiveness to me, if my child is dead?” Ragnar’s breath puffs warm and stale on Athelstan’s face, his voice twisting with the dregs of bitter disappointment, with the beginning of an overwhelming grief. And Ragnar’s salt tear falls onto Athelstan’s cheek, stinging a fresh cut along his flesh.

The mouse scuttles back across the teetering floor, its tiny paws making a _crunch PAD, crunch PAD PAD_ on the straw. The noise is unbearable. Athelstan squints at it. “Quiet,” he moans. “Please.” The mouse keeps stomping, obstinate. _Crunch PAD PAD PAD. Crunch._

Ragnar looks over his shoulder at the door. “Sjurd,” he says, and smooths the cold tear from Athelstan’s face with the side of his thumb. “Sjurd,” he says again, louder. “Sjurd!”

And the door bursts open.

“Sjurd,” Athelstan croaks.

The floor tilts again and the mouse skitters downhill, hurrying away from wide, thumping feet. Rollo pulls his fur tight around his bare shoulders and squats down in Ragnar’s place. He stares, flexing his bare toes in little waves. Athelstan tries to twitch his, but his feet are numb, his legs ending in bare stumps of sensation somewhere below the knee.

“Athelstan,” Rollo drawls, after an eternal pause, seeming to drag the word up from the depths of his memory where all the unimportant things are kept. “It seems Ulfkell told me only half the truth. He did not mention that he had _Ragnar_ _’s_ slave tied up in the stable. Though, I would not have recognised you.” Rollo wrinkles his nose and reaches out, probing at Athelstan’s swollen cheek with a thumb. He presses hard, obviously unsure of his deduction, like a child’s first playing at mud pies, and Athelstan hisses and recoils. His left cheek and ear are gummed to the ground with blood and his skin wrenches when he moves, then tears free and begins to drip again.

A tooth slides loose from its socket. Athelstan tongues at it - pushing it in and out of place. “You need to go fetch them.” It moves when he talks, dangling against his tongue. “The children. If Ragnar cannot.”

Rollo rolls his shoulders forward and stretches his neck from side to side. With the heavy grey furs draped over his shoulders, and his black hair loose and tumbling, he is the silhouette of a stalking wolf. “Ragnar is outlaw. He will be in hiding now. I wouldn’t know where to find him to tell him of this. Unless you have some idea where he might be?”

Athelstan shakes his head against the floor, the constriction of movement turning it into more of a nod up and down against the prickling straw. “Floki is gone too.” And his house, thanks to Athelstan. Though he does not have it in him to feel guilty about that.

A burst of flame springs up in the other half of the little stable. It rises up behind Rollo’s head, curling higher and higher until it hits the roof boards. Black smoke billows up within it into the very apex of the roof and rolls along the central beam. Heat fills the small space and Athelstan’s forehead begins to drip sweat into the congealing blood by his face, but his teeth chatter, filling his head with arcs of lightning.

Rollo ignores the fire entirely, quirking his lips down in a shape that matches his frowning eyebrows. He folds his hands one over the other. “Where are they?”

“Upriver. Fastarr’s. The little place with the pier.” He pauses, pressing his tooth back into place again, and then adds, “It is flooded. The river.”

This news does not appear to surprise Rollo who, with the fire now creeping up the back of his furs, merely grunts deep in his chest. “A two-day walk, not so far. And the journey would pay back a debt. There are worse things to spend time on.” The flames reach Rollo’s hair, brightening the black strands to a fierce, flickering cat’s-eye gold. It creates a halo of light about his head, like those Athelstan spent so many hours painting, against the seeping black cloud of smoke.

"Orpiment." He lifts his bound hands and traces the outline of Rollo’s head with a single, pointed finger. But colours mix, in real life. “Here.” Athelstan touches a bloodied fingernail to the juncture between hair and fur, where the changing flame casts vastly different reflections. The fire leaps to his hand and skims down his arm up to his bent elbows.

“Ulfkell has knocked you remarkably witless for a man who is still awake.” Rollo encloses Athelstan’s hand in a fist and lays it back down on the straw.

Athelstan frowns. “He will not go.” Rollo withdraws his hand and the flames spring up again, along the joints of Athelstan’s fingers. The heat flickers on his face and down his back. Perhaps he is on fire now, too.

“I know how to manage my cousin,” Rollo chuckles. “He is no more difficult than a stag or a fox or any other creature, if only you know how to prod him.”

“He fears to go. He thinks I will rob you.”

“Ha! Small danger of that. No, he hates the water, which for a Northman is akin to a snow-bear fearing the snow. And he knows that we will have to _raft_ across with a sick child.” Rollo shows big white teeth in a grin that looks more fierce than amused. “But we will fetch your waifs, have no worries on that account.”

The room blazes and the earth trembles, stuttering against Athelstan’s hands.

Rollo clicks his tongue on his teeth. “Only a slave could be so delicate as to freeze to death in the summer.” He sweeps off his fur, now engulfed with flame, and drops it in a bundle across Athelstan’s hip. “You’ll need to stay alive,” he says, while Athelstan is getting a grip at the edge of it, “else Gyda will have strong words for me, I don’t doubt.”

Athelstan tugs the fur up across his shoulder and neck. The fire folds itself around his skin from collarbone to spine and down to the bony protrusion of his hip. The fur won’t reach further. He tucks his arms up to his chest, squeezing his hands beneath his chin.

The earth quakes again. Briefly, he worries for the mouse.

The mouse won’t come out. Athelstan prods another crumb of cheese into the gap behind the tall medicine chest and withdraws again, folding his hands beneath his chin. His cowl flops down over his forehead and he huffs in irritation but lets it lie, the shadow of it enfolding his face and hands and a good portion of the cold stone floor. Behind him, the warming fire blazes in the little stone hearth and he stretches his feet back towards it, lifting each bare sole in turn to the surrounding halo of warmth.

“No luck with your quarry?” Eldwyn’s sandals clip-clop across the stone behind him. There is a pause in the noise as Eldwyn steps over Athelstan’s legs, then it resumes away down the long room, heavy-footed and irregular as a footsore horse.

Athelstan shrugs the top of his body and his shadow rises and falls across the floor.

“You’ll chill your bones again, lying there all day.”

Athelstan turns his head to one side, resting his cheek on the protrusion of his knuckles. Beneath Athelstan’s own sickbed and the scratchy woollen blanket that drips off the far side of it, only Eldwyn’s cracked heels are visible by the furthest cot. Despite that Eldwyn cannot possibly see him, Athelstan shrugs again. “Sigeric says I get sick because I’m bad. He says…” and he looks upwards, as if he can stare up into his own skull and pull the memory out, “…I sweep up and let the demons back in. ‘And the final cond _i_ … cond _ishun_ will be worse than the first.’” His chest heaves of a sudden with a racking cough that burns his ribs and he buries his face in his elbow until the fit passes, leaving him sore and breathless.

Eldwyn mutters something that sounds like, “—ought to be concerned about his _own_ condition if I—”

“I don’t sweep though,” Athelstan says, summoning up a little indignance at Sigeric’s error, “I feed the geese. _Cenwulf_ sweeps.” He presses his thumb into the soft fat beneath his jaw. It squashes about when he talks - a fascinating new sensation. “And I don’t see how demons can live in the floor.” There could certainly be no demons in the cellar with the sacred wine. Except for the cat. Athelstan abandons exploration of his pudgy throat and rubs the itchy black scab on his earlobe.

“You get sick,” Eldwyn states, “because no one saw fit to feed you properly when you were small.”

Athelstan furrows his brow, examining this idea. He turns it this way and that, pokes the edges of it, and at last decides it possible.

“Now, if you’re out of bed anyway, you may as well fetch me the medicine I need. The flask, in the chest.”

The chest is twice as tall as Athelstan, red-brown and oiled so that it glows like fire itself. When he pulls open one heavy door on its silent hinges, the medicine-perfumed air spills out. He has to stand on tiptoes to reach Eldwyn’s flask on the uppermost shelf. “Will I always be thin and stupid, then? Since that’s how I grew.”

“And who said you were either of those things?”

Athelstan drops back down onto his heels, his skin slapping the floor, the flask clutched triumphantly aloft. A cough rumbles in his chest again and he takes a moment to catch his breath. “No one has ever liked me very much.” Not his parents, too overwhelmed with keeping everyone alive to have room for feelings; not his siblings, jealous of the newest rival at the dinner pot. Old Brun liked him, but Brun is a dog and that doesn’t count. Athelstan blinks back tears. “I don’t know what I do wrong.”

Eldwyn settles himself on the folding stool in the corner of the room and gestures Athelstan over with two fingers.

Away from the fire, the chill dark deepens at every step and Athelstan hurries between the rows of empty cots towards the glow of the lamp burning in the niche above the merchant’s bed. The merchant himself is a sweltering lump beneath his blankets, his fever a tangible emanation once Athelstan steps past the foot of the cot. He checks himself and slides backwards, crunching his toes up within the border of the last stone of the aisle.

Eldwyn’s humming silhouette raises its head. “You have good friends here, Athelstan. You just don’t see it yet.”

Athelstan squints hard. “The geese?” he says, in a faltering tone. They have learned him well enough to crowd around him when he arrives in the morning. But, “I don’t think geese _like_ anyone.”

“Then perhaps it is not the geese that I mean,” Eldwyn says, flicking up one eyebrow, and he starts humming again.

A scrabbling noise near the fire indicates that the mouse has finally emerged and in his bed the merchant draws a short, rattling breath. It sounds like Death’s cloak rasping on the floor and Athelstan looks about, his spine tickling. But the room is still empty, and the lamp burns straight and steady, casting a pale golden glow on Eldwyn’s brown beard and the merchant’s thinning face.

“He’s—” ‘the colour of horse piss’, Athelstan almost blurts out, before Sigeric’s livid red face looms up in his mind’s eye and chokes his words into a squeaky silence, “—yellow.”

“Yes,” Eldwyn answers, with a long sigh, “and far past anything but a miracle. But we do what we can nonetheless.” He holds out a weather-wrinkled hand and the sleeve of his habit slips down his arm, showing the sharp edge to the sun-browned skin just above the elbow.

Athelstan holds onto the frame of the bed and passes him the flask by leaning out on tiptoes as far as he can reach. “What’s in this one?” He cannot help staring at the irregular rise and fall of the man’s chest, wondering, in the back of his mind, what it might be like to see a man’s final breath. And what happens then? If he watches very carefully, will the soul slip out between those crooked teeth?

“A good deal of things.” Eldwyn pops out the wooden stopper and a sweet scent bursts out into the room. It settles on Athelstan’s tongue a smooth and silky honey, followed by the tantalising savoury of Father Cuthbert’s feast-day meats. Eldwyn sniffs too, nostrils flaring wide. “Do not be fooled, boy. Wormwood may smell like a delectation but it tastes like a poison.”

“Is it? A poison?”

"Yes… and no." Eldwyn pauses for an interminable time after that nebulous statement, contemplating the merchant's clammy face. "It may act for good or ill in equal measure. In that regard, it is little different to you or me."

Athelstan coughs and his breath that rattles up and down behind his ribs. A pale golden glow spreads across the stable floor, touching his toes with bars of warm light. Ragnar’s place is empty, the straw all kicked aside to reveal the empty brown of the earthen floor. Athelstan tugs the fur close around his neck and feels the isolation in the silence.

“They have gone, you know.” Lagertha’s bare feet are quiet as the mouse’s scrabbling, nothing more than a little shuffle as she rounds his head, a tiny drift of straw that could easily be the wind. “They left you some things.” She hitches the skirt of her shift and indicates two new buckets with a pointing gesture of her toes. Then she kicks them with the flat of her foot. One makes a hollow thud, the other sloshes. “Hmm,” she says, “that may be confusing in a few days.”

“I kept my oath,” Athelstan mumbles, eyes drooping, “Rollo will take care of the children.”

“Rollo.” Lagertha looks down her shoulder at him, eyes narrowing a little, a gentle furrow appearing between her eyebrows. She tilts her head and the golden plait of her hair sweeps round into the light. It is dotted with beads - red and blue and green. After the flood, there came a rainbow. “Rollo is—” But whatever Rollo is she decides not to say, instead pressing a stiff smile onto her lips. Reaching down, she flips over the empty bucket and sits down on it, kicking her legs out from beneath the skirts of her shift into a crude, manly splay.

Athelstan stares at the bottom of her foot, at the thick callousing across the ball and heel and the soft skin in between, all dusted with dirt. Her linens must be newly clean, bringing up the scent of fresh, warm air and biting lye, though the hem is grey from dusting the ground.

“I meant what I said. ‘Any harm’, Priest.”

His eyes drift open and shut. He is so very tired and his body aches right down to the core. “It is done now.”

Lagertha leans forward, scraping her heels back along the floor. Between her feet there sits a wooden cup and plate and a single hunk of bread. “It is _not_ done.” Her eyes blaze. “Not until my children are returned to me.”

“Are you intending to pull my lungs out after all? Because… I think…” he starts to laugh, but his chattering teeth bite chunks out of the sound, “…it is too late now.”

“I have trusted you with my dearest treasure. You swore to it with your life.”

“And I have _given_ it.” He would shout it, were he not so breathless. His voice breaks at the end.

Lagertha’s expression hardens. “With your _life_ , Priest. Not with your death.” She picks up the bread and folds it into Athelstan’s hand. “Do not give me what I have not asked for.”

Across the table, Gyda giggles. “That is not what I asked for.” She stands the ladle up on its end next to her bowl. “How am I to eat with this? I said ‘spoon’. Spoon,” she repeats, making an exaggerated scooping gesture with the over-sized version.

Athelstan jerks his chin in a small nod, flushing hot red along his cheekbones. “Yes. Of course. Forgive me.” He wipes the flour from his hands onto his tunic and his movements are every bit as stuttering as his words. In the bright dawn light that pours through the front door the flour rises in sparkling clouds of dust.

Gyda’s smile fades at the corners, rolling downwards like curling petals.

She was only teasing him. And unlike Bjorn or Ragnar or Lagertha, her remarks are never meant to be cutting. Athelstan’s shoulders droop. “Forgive me.” Last night’s dreams dance still in the back of his mind. Real and imagined twining together into a newer, uglier monster. This morning, his breath has been short - trapped within too-tight lungs - as if he is still drowning.

When he turns back with the spoon, Gyda’s eyes have taken on a calculating glint. “Tell me a story, Athelstan.” And she pats the seat beside her on the bench, shuffling over to make more room.

Athelstan takes the ladle from her with a regretful tilt of his head. “I have chores to do, Gyda.” The grinding and the milking and, in Lagertha’s garden, a month’s worth of weeds that seem to have sprung up in the week since she left. God forbid they return and find anything so shamefully undone. “I do not have the time now.”

“Please? Mother often tells stories in the morning, and I…”

…miss them. Athelstan looks around. There is so much to do. The floor needs scrubbing and the furs beating and the lamps refilling and a list of a hundred other things. But his very bones are heavy with exhaustion.

“I liked the one about the red sea,” Gyda prompts, recapturing his drifting attention. And at the flit of his gaze along the disorganised stone shelf, “Only for a few minutes, while I eat. Then we can work together.”

He hesitates, frowning, irritated at his own indecisiveness.

“It’s Sunday. Aren’t you Christians supposed to rest on Sundays?”

There are many things that Athelstan _supposed_ to be doing, but he is too distracted to feel guilty right at this moment. “How do you know that?”

Gyda shrugs. “You told Father, that night you got drunk, how it is against the law to work on a Sunday.” She pauses, considering that and revises with, “The _first_ time you got drunk.”

The strength vanishes from Athelstan’s knees. He drops down on the bench so hard that it creaks and jolts and Gyda is bucked into the air a short way. Athelstan begins to rub his face with one hand, but even that is too much and he lets it fall into his lap. “I did not remember that.” He does now. And one thing sparks another and another and— oh, God, what has he _done_?

Gyda nudges him and he flinches. The light dapples through the partition onto the table and Gyda’s porridge sits cold and sludgy in the bowl. “The red sea?” She stares at him, eyes wide and expectant.

Athelstan gulps a lump of anger and nearly chokes on it. He does not want to tell stories. But his sins are not Gyda’s fault, so he swallows again, finds his words, and begins.

Soon afterwards she pushes her bowl of porridge in front of him, still half full. “I cannot eat any more, you have it. What is a chariot?”

And Athelstan answers, that question and the next and the one after that, until all the food is gone and he isn’t sure how it happened. He looks at the bowl, at the spoon in his hand.

“Are there more stories like this?” Gyda asks, yanking him back out of his spiralling thoughts just as the sickness starts to rise in his stomach.

He blinks at her and shakes his head, struggling to catch the trail of a thought. “A-about escape?”

Gyda folds her thin lips into the mock-stern expression she is so fond of using on the goats. “No, silly. About finding a new home.”


	24. Chapter 24

He sleeps and does not sleep. He wakes and does not wake.

His mouth is sawdust. His tongue bulges against his teeth, rough as a strip of dried meat. Swallowing rips a layer of skin from the back of his throat. He reaches trembling hands for the wooden cup. Between his fingers, it trembles too. It raps against the inside of the bucket and the noise it makes is a dull ringing, like a submerged bell. Perhaps it summons Cenwulf to Lauds from his watery grave. Perhaps it rings for Rannveyg and her unnamed child. The bucket’s uneven lip stabs into his elbow, wrenched over it, bones straining, until at last warm water cascades over his fingers. The cup is slippery now, with silver drops that patter onto hand and wood and floor, drawing dotted patterns on the straw on its way down. He pushes up on one shuddering arm and brings the trembling cup to his lips. Lightning flashes through his cheek, white in the dim day-dark. He flinches, the cup slides from his hands, clatters to the ground and rolls away. His elbow gives way and he thumps back into the straw, curling his hands into his throat, pressing his thumb into the aching lump at the base of his jaw, and watches the cup jolt to a stop against the stable door.

He sleeps. He wakes.

He drinks direct from the bucket, face in the water like an animal. He ignores Floki who is on the roof beams, his long legs a-squat, perched like a giant spider after a fly and giggling to himself. The water is lukewarm and stale, full of floating insects and dust. It tastes the way an old book smells. It tastes dry. His arms shudder holding him up, his hands in fists against the ground, and his heart thuds, beating his ribs against the wood. When he lies down again, water dribbles from his mouth to the floor, no better than a dog. Here he _is_ an animal, and nothing has changed since they swept up the river in the faering, nothing at all. Floki laughs.

He sleeps. He wakes.

He picks crumbs from the bread and sucks them beneath his tongue. It melts into a mash that he cannot swallow without choking. The band of iron wraps tighter and tighter about his head. He spits out the mulch of bread onto the ground. His shoulder burns with a deep, slow flame that spreads its fingers across his back. It is the grasping hand of Death. He tells the time by its creeping heat while the night’s shadows dance on the wall.

He sleeps. He wakes.

He tugs the empty bucket by its rope, scraping it inch by inch across the floor, and tips it onto its side. Relieving himself into it is messy but there isn’t much anyway - a few spoonfuls of dribbling yellow liquid that stinks worse than whatever is dripping from his shoulder, slipping porridge-thick and sticky down the inside of his tunic. Lagertha pauses her sweeping to cast him a disapproving look and the wind whistles outside.

He sleeps. Ragnar wakes him, jolting him by the shoulder.

He gulps a drink from the water bucket. He considers the bread and his stomach revolts. The water spews back up, burning, and splatters across the floor. The retching continues, so violent that he smacks his head against the bucket but cannot cry out, his jaw spasmed open to expel all his wretched emptiness. A singular breath comes in a shallow gasp and is forced out again in a subdued cry. His skull contracts around his brain. The vomit puddles across the dirt then sinks down into it, leaving only the foaming flecks.

He sleeps. He wakes.

He lies unmoving, Rollo kicking at his back, his hair dripping sweat into the dark stain of his bile on the dirt. Shattered glass fills his throat. He presses his teeth into his tongue and the impressions remain, like the scalloped edges of a seashell. Sunlight pours in about the door, picking out drops of water on the lip of the bucket as perfect spheres of amber. When he touches a tentative fingertip to one it breaks, colour dispersing, and glides down the outside of the bucket into the straw. He swallows and his throat refills with glass.

He sleeps.

The bread is mouldy. He spends some time picking off furry lumps of grey and green which stick to his fingers instead. What is left of the bread is much smaller than his fist. The mouse perches on his hand and nibbles at it, long whiskers tickling his thumb. Its tiny ears are translucent as water in the light. He cups his hands about it and its trembling warmth warms his palms. Frodi barks outside. The mouse scampers out of his hands into hiding. The bread is almost all gone. He isn’t hungry anyway.

He wakes.

Rain patters against the walls. The noise stabs his aching head. He pushes his knuckles beneath his temple, the blood-vomit grime of the floor caking to the side of his palm. His fingers are ice.

He wakes.

He is searing hot and dry as summer sand. He pulls the fur from his shoulder and presses it away, arching back against the wall in search of cooler earth.

He wakes.

He is shivering, knees pulled to his chin, tongue bloody. He hugs the fur to his neck.

He wakes.

The stable is grey gloom and the mouse nibbles at the lump of bread. He smiles, reaching out to touch the tiny ears.

Bands of golden daylight fall across his fingers. They twitch, though he doesn’t remember moving them. They make insignificant shadows on the straw.

Put the fire out, please! His bones are red-hot brands inside his skin. His flesh melts.

The world creaks and groans.

This is an old bed, hard and noisy. Is he sick again? “Eldwyn?” he breathes. Or perhaps he forgot to speak.

Coughing. Gagging. “What is that _stink_? Is he dead?” It’s a young voice, high, worried.

Not him, _his_ breath whines in and out, in and out, in an endless wheezing circuit. “Cenwulf?” Cenwulf always comes to visit him when he’s sick.

Footsteps. A hand on his neck. It’s made of ice.

Don’t touch! He shivers and his brain rattles inside his head.

“No,” chuckling, “he’s alive yet, Pup. Though without the little sense I left him with.”

“Are you awake, Athelstan? Look at me.” The world spins, twirling bright candle flames.

But it’s not time yet. It’s not dawn. Get off. “Leor!”

“Nonsense. You rattled his brain too hard.”

“That’s not nonsense, that’s English. I’m not going to ‘go away’, Athelstan. Wake up.”

He pulls at the furs, curling up small. But the bed smells. Old Brun has snuck in with him again.

“Urgh. You let him piss himself?”

“We left him a bucket.”

“And tied him up. How did you expect him to use it? You could have left him in the house.”

“Pfft. To piss on my furs? He’s better off out here.”

He coughs. A knife in his throat - sharp, cutting - and words spill out like blood, messy.

“No one is going to kill you, you idiot. You are doing a good job of that all by yourself.” Bjorn’s face is a moon. His eyes are a bright, bright blue.

“You _do_ fuss like Gyda’s goats.”

Bjorn grins. “Shut up.”

He shuts his eyes. Warm hands press against his face. Warm. But his skull cracks apart at the touch. “Please,” it “hurts!” A breathless whine. Snow falls in silver drifts over his numb hands, blown prickling sharp by the wind, and Frodi’s blood seeps out into it, melting from scarlet to rose.

“I want him inside. Can we do that, or are your precious furs still too important?”

“No need to bite, Pup. We will move him. Help me, Ulfkell.”

“I’m not washing after him.”

“Don’t believe him, he has been washerwoman often enough in the past. Are you ready?”

Jolting, a ship in a storm. Stop! His bones break apart in the raging sea. Cenwulf's body is stiff against his shoulder. _Close your eyes and join him._

Screams. Screams echo in his head, bouncing from side to side and wall to wall. The air is smoke. Floki started the fire too early. They are all inside, they are all asleep! He scrambles up, falls. The room washes black. Rushes scratch at his cheek.

“He’s out of bed. Again.”

“We should have left him in the stable. If I wanted waking ten times a night I’d have found a woman to breed.”

“No woman would put up with your complaining, Ulfkell. Arms or legs this time?”

“Arms. I had the flailing end an hour past.”

The river grabs him. “No!” It drags him under. It spins him about and dashes him against rocks. He throws up black nothingness.

“He was more co-operative when he wasn’t fever sick.”

“Then you shouldn’t both have left him to _get_ fever sick. Stay in bed, Gyda, you need to rest too. Take a drink while you’re awake.”

“I’ll have to tie him up again, Bjorn.”

“If it keeps him there. Drink, Gyda. Do as you are told for once.”

The water crushes him down. His arms are tangled up tight behind him and he cannot swim. Breathing hurts.

“He kicks like a baby goat though.”

“He was scrawny as a child, he hasn’t much improved. Leave him, he will settle.”

His shoulder aches. No, it burns. A fire flickers and he is alight, the hot iron digging down through his flesh to blacken his bones. “Please,” someone whimpers in his ear. Wool scratches his lips, muffling his hot breath.

A touch on his arm - four small fingers and a thumb. They squeeze. “Keep still, I’m almost finished. Sjurd says I have to get it all out this time or it won’t get any better.”

He stills, obedient. He is good at being obedient now. For a long, long time, he wasn’t. But no one has told his breath not to moan and so it does. “Bjorn? What is a yule log?”

Laughing. “Always with your questions. I will tell you when you won’t sleep through the answer.”

His throat is dry. He tries to reach for the bucket but his arms are tied behind. “Not a wolf.” That is important, though he doesn’t remember why. “Not a wolf.”

Yawning, the scrabbling of fabric against fabric and the crunching of feet across straw. “What is it, Athelstan?”

“Not a wolf,” he breathes again. And that is somehow connected to “Gyda?”

“Gyda is sleeping. There’s no wolf here, the doors are shut. Go back to sleep.”

The flood closes over his head, he chokes on river water. Where is the light? He kicks against the riverbed and it moves with a grunt.

“You’re sure you don’t want his legs tied, too?”

“Because Sjurd can’t hold onto a baby goat? Drink, Athelstan. You and Gyda are as bad as each other.”

Gyda drank the river water. He jerks his head away. Something hits his cheekbone and drips hot and wet down his face.

A muttered curse. “Would you stop it?”

“Here, I’ll do it. Tighten the rope on his arms there. Sjurd, you have his legs well enough now?”

A grunted reply.

The water is heavy, immovable as rock. A hand grasps his hair and panic floods up the way the river went down. Ragnar, don’t hurt, “Don’t—!” Pain bursts blinding white in the back of his skull. His mouth opens in a shocked, silent gasp and water pours in again. Drowning, he is drowning. Ragnar threw him into the fjord. The white blooms outwards, covering everything, cloudlike.

Too bright. Too bright! He squeezes his eyes shut but it still burns. He tucks his head down. The ground is soft and warm, damp against his cheek. He burrows his face into it. Blankets. They smell of mint and fennel. “Eldwyn?”

A clatter. Footsteps. “No, I’m still Bjorn. Are you awake this time?”

“What time is it?” The bells don’t ring here in the sickroom. Has he missed Nones? When is Cenwulf coming to visit?

“It’s afternoon.”

He shivers and it aches his bones. He always gets sick when the weather turns cold. Sigeric says it is a judgement. It feels like one. “It is afternoon.” Will Ragnar kill him for being sick? That seems possible. Killing ewes and lying in bed; he is a terrible slave.

“What? No, that was hours ago. It’s late now, everyone else is asleep.” Warm furs slip close about his neck. “And so are you again by the look of it.” A hand on his shoulder. “Sleep well, Athelstan.”

“No, I’m awake.”

“Good, maybe you can try a little breakfast. I made it, but I didn’t burn it much. Here, can you sit up?”

The room swirls and bounces. His stomach spins with it, faster and faster. He throws up mint and pain. The ache in his head swells and crushes as if his skull is being squeezed by a giant hand, but he doesn’t mean to cry. His tears burn trails down his face until Bjorn wipes them off.

The fire crackles. The flames dance in yellow and red and white and amid them a pot bubbles. The mild buttery smell of fresh boiled fish makes his stomach growl. It twists on itself like an angry, coiling snake. The bench shakes, some movement at the far end of it jolting the boards, then it settles with the soft sloughing of clothing against furs.

“What will you do then?” Bjorn’s sigh is thick, the way it sounds when he is hiding a yawn.

“What is there to do?” Sjurd answers, from somewhere beyond the fire. “The animals are scattered. I will have to find some other way to survive this year. There is fishing, I suppose,” he adds, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, bordering on disgust. “A man does what he must.”

“For how long?”

“With the lake as it is?” There is a clicking noise, like a tongue on teeth. “The hunting will be bare this year and the next at least. A good many of the young and mating pairs were killed in the mudslides, more in the flood after the debris shifted. You should warn your family once we get you to them; it will be no good trying to make up for your losses by searching the wilds for sustenance this season. Best to over-winter with friends if you can and try to start somewhere new next summer.”

Bjorn hums to himself. “We will be in Kattegat anyway, with the farm gone. With Uncle Rollo.”

“And your father?”

“I… don’t know…” The note of caution in Bjorn’s tone is plain enough, even in the muddiness of Athelstan’s current state. “He cannot be in Kattegat,” Bjorn continues. “He isn’t with Floki…” He isn’t with Floki _in Floki_ _’s house_. But that still leaves a wide landscape, full of possibilities.

“Bjorn?” His voice emerges in a whispering rasp, less a word than a noise, but it rumbles around inside his head, setting off a thumping ache at the back. He winces. The fire is a low, barely-there red now, the very last dregs of a sunset before the world turns to shadow.

Bjorn stumbles into the glow of it a moment later, his tunic all awry, hair tousled. He yawns and rubs at his face where angry red marks betray the state of his blankets. “What is it?”

Athelstan hesitates. He cannot remember what he was thinking to say. Instead, he asks the next thing that comes to mind, “How is Gyda?”

“Better than you. And if you remember that for the next time I’ll be very surprised.” Bjorn turns away, his eyes slitting closed even while he is still on his feet.

Athelstan grabs at his sleeve, fingers shaking with the effort. He has a vague notion that it is wrong to be able to do so, but then he is distracted by Bjorn’s start of surprise.

Bjorn looks down at him again, blinking into alertness, his shoulders lifting out of an exhausted slump. “Do you know where you are now?”

“Yes.” Athelstan manages a cautious nod in emphasis. His blankets scratch his cheek and the faint smell of medicine catches on the wispy stubble of his face. “Sjurd. Ulfkell. Not a wolf. Gyda is asleep.”

Bjorn utters an explosive sigh and drops to the bench by Athelstan’s knees, his body melting into laxness. “I was getting worried about you.” He scratches at the back of his neck, which reddens a little. Though that might be a trick of the half-light. It is a shocking admission, and when Bjorn looks up again and sees Athelstan’s wide-eyed reaction he blusters, “What? Do you think I want to go back to shovelling up the pig shit myself? I stink for weeks afterwards.” Athelstan slips the expected smile onto his lips and Bjorn’s shoulders slump again. “We ran out of honey while your shoulder was still festering. You were so hot we could have cooked our meals on you and saved ourselves the firewood.”

A warmth still burns in the skin of Athelstan’s face, but it is a mere kindling fire now, rather than a raging inferno. He brushes the hair out of his eyes - Gyda said she would cut it for him - and touches his palm to his forehead. It feels cool, not icy. His hand quakes, spent already, and he scratches his ruined cheek with his thumb. He flinches. But it does not hurt, not the lightning-storm shock from before. He moves to poke at it but Bjorn grabs his hand and coaxes it away.

“Leave it. It needs to stay clean.”

"It feels better." Athelstan probes around with his tongue instead and sure enough there is no hole in the side of his cheek, though the inside is crisscrossed with rough, puckered lines.

“Sjurd sewed you up. It will scar, it had already started healing badly by the time he got to it.”

Athelstan drops his eyes, remembering the crushing death of the wolf’s jaws, the grinding of its teeth against his. He plucks at the sleeping furs and tries to quash the shivering response in his shoulders.

“Women love scars, though,” Bjorn says, rather too hasty to be reassuring. “That’s what Uncle Rollo says. You will get lots of sex.” He pauses. “If you decide to start having sex. Though I don’t know why you wouldn’t, all the other men I know cannot seem to stop talking about it.”

Athelstan isn’t sure that there will be much opportunity for sex wherever Earl Haraldson is going to send him - to the slave traders, or to the bottom of the fjord, or up on the gibbet beside Leppa’s leathery corpse. He doubts there is any limit to what the Earl might do in pure spite against Ragnar. He takes a shuddering breath. It might be best not to think about that for now. In any case, the state of his face is the least of his worries. “No, that is not—” he shakes his head, forgetting that he shouldn’t. The ache surges and he has to shut his eyes and breathe through it, colours flashing in the back of his head.

The fire crackles in the hearth and in the woods an owl hoots, its haunting voice carrying through the still air. It doesn’t feel late, but Athelstan has long since lost all sense of time. When he opens his eyes again, stubborn tears clumping at the corners, Bjorn is staring into the fire, his hands clasped between his knees. His hair has grown too, and is fluffy as a baby duck at the back, beginning to hide the protrusion of the ears that he hasn’t quite grown into yet. Athelstan’s hand is still clutched in his dirty tunic sleeve and he moves his fingers to squeeze Bjorn’s forearm. “The wolf killed Frodi,” he says, quiet out of necessity, blunt because he doesn’t know how better to tell him.

Bjorn freezes then nods, a small and timid movement. “I thought as much.” He looks down at his hands, rubbing them together in a nervous gesture. “He did his work, didn’t he? He kept you alive.”

“He did.” He gave warning and Athelstan left him behind. One day he will have to tell it all, but not today. "I tried my best to save him too,” he says, because that is important for Bjorn to know. But he knows nothing about fighting anything more vicious than sleep or boredom. Frodi never had a chance.

Another nod.

“You…” Athelstan’s eyes drift shut. He wills them open again, but they don’t obey.

He wakes again to stale daylight and the clattering of bowls. His arm hangs over the side of the bench, his fingertips dusting the floor. Something swipes across his palm, cold and wet, and Athelstan peeks his head over the side, resting his chin on the edge of the board. Agni licks his hand again, then butts a cold nose into Athelstan’s wrist. Athelstan breathes out a soft laugh and rolls over further. His muscles are stiff, every joint frozen and it takes him some time, grunting under his breath, until he can scratch the top of Agni’s scruffy little head, pulling the pointed ears through his hand the way Frodi always liked it.

“It seems even the dog is charmed by you.”

Turning to look makes his head spin again. By the time the room settles back into place, Ulfkell has made his way around the hearth and is standing over him, his usual bland frown peering out from behind his beard. Athelstan shrinks down against the bench in the face of it, drawing his hand back from Agni’s head.

Ulfkell’s lips twitch in some brief acknowledgement of Athelstan’s wariness. “Food,” he says, and nudges Athelstan in the shoulder with a flatbread.

Athelstan works himself up on one elbow and takes it with mumbled gratitude. It’s fresh, warm, the centre of it slightly gooey to touch. He scoops out a lump of the soft inside and yeasty steam wafts out with it. “How is Gyda?” He presses the morsel into his mouth and chews, tentative, holding his breath. But his stomach does not revolt, his jaw does not send bolts of agony up through his head. He swallows, and nothing happens but a further grumble of his stomach.

Ulfkell sits down on the opposite bench and peels off mud-covered boots. “Well enough. She sleeps. She walks about a little.” With his feet free, he puts one up on the bench and stretches the other out to the fire, slouching over his upraised knee. He regards Athelstan with hard brown eyes but doesn’t speak further.

“How long has it been?” Athelstan looks about, though what clues he might find he isn’t sure. He has the remembrance of several days and nights - or at least several lights and darknesses - since he was brought into the house, but beyond that everything is a jumbled mess. The longhouse hasn’t changed much since his first brief visit, except that there are more furs on the benches, a large basket of half-prepared vegetables on the trestle table, and a boy’s tunic hung up from the roof beams to air out.

Ulfkell fidgets with his beard. “Two weeks, or thereabouts.”

Athelstan almost drops the bread. He calculates from the last time he was sure of the date and ends up somewhere in the middle of August; nearly a month since they left the farm. A month! He has been away from it almost as long as he was there. “I… do not remember.”

“You wouldn’t. You were more than halfway to the other world until a few days past.” Ulfkell picks up one dirty boot and a scrubbing brush from the shelf behind and begins scraping off the mud with short, precise motions.

Athelstan’s heart sinks. “It has been raining again.”

“It still is.”

He tilts his head and listens. Behind the gentle crackling of the fire, there is another noise - a constant, soft swishing on the roof tiles and occasionally the louder plip-plop of collected rain falling from the eaves. “The summer rains.” On any other occasion it would be a comforting sound, especially after such a long, ruinous heat. “Our river…”

“Will be impassible from now until long after the snowmelt." Ulfkell flips the boot over and starts on the sole.

Athelstan scrapes out the last of the soft bread and contemplates the remaining crust. “But you know how to get us to Kattegat?”

Ulfkell pauses his work long enough to shrug. “We have discussed it. With _Bjorn_.” That last is uttered in a warning tone.

He ignores it. “How then?”

“That’s no business for a slave,” Ulfkell snaps, “even one so liked as you. Now quiet.”

Athelstan snaps his mouth shut and drops his gaze again, picking at the edge of the crust.

Footsteps scrape on the rushes at the door. The wattle partition, draped with blankets, blocks Athelstan’s view, but from his place nearer the workbench Ulfkell glances up and back to his work without a change of expression. The footsteps multiply into the tripping of several legs.

Bjorn’s face appears first, rosy-cheeked and dripping rain. “The log pile is low. I’ll have to split some more in the morning.” A muted thudding suggests the dropping of wood against the wall. “It’s getting worse out there.” He wanders in as far as the central hearth, now empty-handed, rubbing his face with a damp sleeve, though he misses a raindrop on his nose, which dribbles to the end and drips off onto the floor.

“That’s the way of it,” Ulfkell says, angling the boot-heel into the light for closer inspection.

Bjorn holds his hands out to the fire and blinks around the room. His linen undertunic sops against his skin, showing off the round of his belly button. His gaze lands on Athelstan then flicks to Athelstan’s hands and the picked remains of the bread crust, and a lopsided smile slips onto his face. “He’s awake again. See, Gyda?” He tips his chin to his collarbone, looking over his shoulder. “Properly awake. And eating this time.”

“He is?” Gyda pops into view, hands in mid-swipe down the breast of her clothing; a man’s tunic, worn as a dress, cinched tight at the waist with her belt. She moves to tug strands of wet hair out of her eyes but succeeds only in jabbing herself in the face with the big lump of rolled-up sleeve that still dips over her fingertips. “You are!” she says, so loud that Agni jumps up from his bed by the fire and skitters away to the other end of the room. Her face lights up, bright as the morning sun, and she bursts into tears.


	25. Chapter 25

"You still look terrible." Gyda rolls her toes and stretches out long like a cat, bumping her heel against Athelstan's. Across the room, Ulfkell lets out a short _hmmph_ of disapproval but otherwise says nothing.

Sitting up against the partition feels a dizzying altitude after so long lying down and Athelstan keeps his head stiff-still between the folds of the wattle weavers. Beyond his central vision, the room wobbles in a disconcerting fashion. “Thank you.” He gives Gyda a wry smile. “So do you.”

The hollows of Gyda’s eyes are far too pronounced for Athelstan’s comfort, and she has lost much of the fat that used to round out her face. But her nose still wrinkles into a satisfactory childishness when she pokes her tongue out between sallow lips. In her reflected position, sprawled along the bench with her splayed hands behind her, the sticky remains of tear-tracks on her face flicker in and out of visibility as silver trails in the firelight.

At the table to the rear of the room, Bjorn pulls another turnip from the pile and gestures his knife at them. “You’re not going to cry again, are you?”

“I’m tired,” Gyda excuses, committing to a yawn and confirming it.

Bjorn hacks the turnip into uneven rounds. “Who is it has been keeping you both alive all this time? And you are terrible patients. _I_ _’m_ tired.” He rubs one eye for emphasis, scrubbing his palm into the dark swathe beneath it, and drops his shoulders into a boneless slump with a deep, exhausted sigh.

“Well it won’t last much longer,” Gyda says. “Soon enough you’ll be sitting around drinking with Uncle Rollo while Mother and Athelstan and I keep the house all winter.”

Athelstan jolts. “Me? I’m to go to Earl Haraldson.” His voice breaks on the words and he clears his throat with a cough. “Am I not?” His hand tremors in the furs. He grasps it with the other, squeezing the fingers still.

Gyda sets her jaw and levels him with a fierce look. “We’ll buy you back.”

“Gyda!” Bjorn hisses, leaning over the trestles, pretending that everyone else in the room cannot hear his objection. “Don’t tell him things like— We don’t _know._ ”

She twists about, arm trembling in the awkward position, and growls, “We will buy him back.”

“Have you any idea how much silver…?” Bjorn trails off in the face of Gyda’s livid expression. He shakes his head. “If I were you, I would worry more about what will happen to Father, and _us,_ if we cannot get the outlawry revoked.”

At that, Gyda falls silent, chewing on her lip.

Bjorn scowls down at the table and goes back to his chopping and Ulfkell’s boot-scraping fills in the uneven spaces between the thudding of the knife.

‘We will buy you back.’ The cold creeping remembrance of what exactly his position is here spirals up Athelstan’s spine like a choking tendril of ivy. He drops his gaze, the edges of the room blurring for a moment, and stares at his hands, half-buried in the furs. They are a mottled collection of colours, from black to purple to green and yellow. And though the grazes have healed to small black scabs there is still blood in the webbing of his fingers. If they are any indication of what his face looks like, then Gyda is right - he does look terrible. He has pretended, for a while, that what he thinks and says and does is somehow important, despite his position. ‘We will _buy_ you _…’_ And he held onto it, in the face of Ulfkell’s violence, because of his oath. But his oath will be finished once the children are in Kattegat.

“You lost your cross,” Gyda says.

Athelstan draws a sharp, wakening breath through his nose and pushes himself up straighter. Despite knowing the stupidity of it, he reaches for the familiar weight at his breastbone and closes his hand on empty air. He presses his fingertips into his palm instead and rests his fist against his chest. It feels hollow. "I have never taken it off. It was a gift from Eldwyn, after my final vows." Grief weighs down his words and he smiles a sad, lopsided smile at his knees. One of the hearthstones still carries a darker, redder stain on its fire-blackened surface. His cross is in the rushes there somewhere. Years from now someone might find it, but he doubts it will raise more than a wondering eyebrow before it is tossed on the midden heap.

“I know.” Gyda straightens, scrabbling about her clothing. “Here.”

Something thumps in the hollow of his lap and slides down into the folds of the furs. Athelstan teases it out and lays it on his palm. It’s a small wooden cross, hung from a length of fine flax cord. It is made of two wide sections of twig, whittled flat front and back then bound into shape. The crosspiece still has the hump of a node on the top side.

“That’s the back,” Gyda says, crossing her legs beneath the trailing hem of the blue tunic. Her knees and toes peek out, clean white skin hiding between patches of drying mud. “Turn it over.” She leans right over her knees, peering at his hands, shoulders pulled tense with what he assumes is a subdued excitement.

Athelstan does. They have bound it the wrong way - with the crosspiece behind - but they had no way of knowing it; they have never seen a cross before Athelstan’s pewter one. But down the uninterrupted length of the upright piece are two series of runes, one Norse and one English. Athelstan brushes away a stray splinter from the writing. “’I belong to Athelstan.’”

“So you cannot lose this one,” Bjorn says.

A soft laugh escapes Athelstan’s throat. His head thumps harder in retribution. “I lost your amulet, too.” She should have marked everything. The farm and the goats and Athelstan’s own stupid bones. Except that he does not belong to them now. They have lost him, also.

Gyda narrows her eyes at him, somehow reading his thoughts. “Don’t do that.” The sweep of her freckles across her more prominent bones gives her displeasure a frightening emphasis. “You haven’t lost anything. Ulfkell has it.”

“I told him you were a mother hen.” His eyes fight to close and pull him down again into dreamless slumber. Athelstan forces them wide and looks about the room instead, into the darker spaces around the fire.

Ulfkell _hmmphs_ again. “Don’t draw me into this.” He sets his boots to one side, picks a strip of leather from a work basket, and begins slicing out the stitching with the tip of his knife.

“Thank you,” Athelstan says, surprising himself by being in total earnest, “for fetching them.”

Ulfkell flicks hooded eyes to Gyda and Bjorn in a vague acknowledgement but his mouth retains its permanent frown. “Thank Sjurd.”

‘But you went too,’ Athelstan wants to say. It would be easy to hate Ulfkell, to fear him, but he cannot find the room for it. He does not have the energy either, he finds, as his eyes start blinking shut again.

“Whose turn is it to tell a story?” Gyda asks. Already her voice is far away, down a long dark tunnel.

“Yours. But it needs to be a good one.”

“Not everything has to have a battle in it, Bjorn. And you put dragons in yours where there aren’t any.”

Their voices slip further and further away until Athelstan lies alone in the dark, drifting on an endless sea.

***

Dawn blooms in fire over the woods, turning the bright green canopy to a muddy yellow. Athelstan sits to rest on the chopping stump on his way back from the privy, stretching his aching right leg out in front of him. He leans over it, kneading at the pain and peering up at the glowing orange sky. The rain stopped some hours ago, but the remains of it drips in steady streams from the eaves, marking a trench in the dirt around the house. Athelstan takes a deep breath of the cool morning air and his chest burns in the centre. But it is a pleasant ache, like the warm burn of well-used muscles, heralding a cooler, harvest weather and the slow drawing-in of days. In Lindisfarne, this season means release from other duties. Those who are usually packed into the Scriptorium like brown-backed hens into a henhouse might be out bramble-picking in the last of Summer’s joyous sun or harvesting nettles in the ditches along the sheep field, treading sandalled feet in the cool morning dew and frightening the novices with tales of snakes. This year will different, but Athelstan might have begun to look forward to it all the same. Locked in the stable, awaiting his own fever-addled death, spending the winter on the farm did not seem so terrible a fate in comparison, even with the prospect of Ragnar’s unpredictable company. Athelstan has been the luckiest of those who were taken. But Gyda dreams an impossible dream about buying him back.

He hears Sjurd’s unmistakeable footsteps crossing the yard some long moments before the thump of a foot kicking the stump he sits on, so he does not look about, only ceases his restless pressing of the wolf bite and lays his arms across his thighs instead.

“Your little waif will panic if you are not in your place when she wakes.”

“I am going.” He takes another breath. He was in the stable for so long, then in the house, breathing in smoke and the stink of his own sickness. Out here he can taste the rain, the bitter rosemary from the kitchen garden, and - on the roof of his mouth - a biting layer of sea salt. “In a moment.”

“Or perhaps I have interrupted your escape.”

That is so ridiculous that Athelstan snorts. He looks up to gauge Sjurd's seriousness and catches a wide smile hiding in the huge expanse of his beard, and a firm look in his eye - a little of each, then. Athelstan drops his gaze to save the ache in his neck. At this early time, Athelstan would expect Sjurd to be minimally dressed, with only his trousers and undertunic on for the sake of morning chores. But Sjurd has leather overtunic and fur boots and all, the rolled end of a bundle of furs peeks up over his shoulder and his belt bristles with weapons.

Athelstan gestures at them. “You are going somewhere?”

Sjurd squints into the sun's glare, the whole side of his face crinkling with his eyes, with such an intensity that it seems he must be measuring the time, though it is so obvious as to be pointless. "To town," he says, at last, settling his feet into a more restful stance, "to send a message. If the Gods grant luck you may be gone before I return."

“Ah.” Athelstan drops his head into a nod and after some consideration, adds, “Rollo has a boat.” He considered it himself not so long ago, sailing around the coast in one of the faerings. Dangerous for him, but not for one who has crossed the sea in a vessel barely larger. Such a simple journey, as soon as someone _knows_.

“So I was told.”

Three days north to the town, Ulfkell said.

Athelstan scratches at the itching scar on his cheek, fingertips disappearing beneath the length of his hair to do so. The stubble on his face has grown prickly too, but the scars themselves are bare of growth - a twisting trail of puckered red skin. He scratches too hard and there is an uncomfortable sensation of both over-sensitivity and numbness. He winces and stops. “How does a slave become free here?” And at Sjurd’s raised eyebrow he shakes his head a little. “You mentioned freed slaves before, back at the farm, but Gyda could not tell me how the law works. You must know.”

“It is not so complicated,” Sjurd shrugs a big shoulder, the furs rising behind in harmonious movement. There are more there than for sleeping on. “If your master allows it, you might have a small craft, or a strip of land, to earn your redemption price.”

Athelstan absorbs this, slipping his gaze along the northern horizon where a kestrel drifts above blazing purple heather. ‘Do you know how much silver it would cost us?’ That is what Bjorn was going to say. And if his sale price is too high, then his redemption will be higher still. “And what is that?” He keeps his tone flat, but he cannot help looking back to Sjurd, up through the greasy curls of his hair, watching the nuances of Sjurd’s expression moving from suspicious to calculating to cautious.

“Twelve ounces of silver, all told.”

The disappointment is expected but still it pools in his gut like too much strong drink. He calculates how much that is worth - several cows or a horse or… How long would it take to earn so much in raising rye or weaving linen or making cheese or ale? Years. Given a generous master, given _time_ , it would be a valuable hope. Athelstan will soon have neither.

“Or—” Sjurd cuts himself off with a click of his teeth. “But no, that is unlikely.”

“Or what?”

The answering laughter is unpleasant; too loud and lilting on a bed of annoyance. “Has that curiosity of yours not got you into enough trouble yet, slave, that you must continue to search out more?”

“Or _what_?” Athelstan presses. He grips the side of the chopping stump, harder than is necessary to take the strain from his neck, more because he half expects a blow and hopes to stay upright. “What were you going to say?”

But Sjurd turns his back in decisive dismissal. He whistles once - a long high-low note - and Agni comes bounding from behind the empty goose pen, ears flapping at the speed.

Ulfkell emerges from the longhouse at the same time as if he has been summoned too. He _is_ dressed for work, the sleeves of his undertunic rolled up past the elbows and his trousers tucked into the tops of his boots.

Sjurd hails him with a raised hand. “Cousin! Come to bid me farewell after all?”

“You go to the town, not the East Sea.” Ulfkell slings an empty bucket over his shoulder by the handles. It thumps on his back to the rhythm of his stamping stride across the yard. “And I am not your wife, I have no need to kiss you on your journey.” He jerks his chin at them as he passes. “Go already. The quicker _you_ leave, the quicker _they_ will.”

“Foul-mooded this morning,” Sjurd murmurs, tipping his head towards Athelstan and slanting him a warning look. He paces forward then and claps Ulfkell on the shoulder, halting him. The hand that is so broad against Athelstan’s bones seems not at all out of place there and Ulfkell does not shrug Sjurd off, as Athelstan expects, though he spins on a slow heel and levels Sjurd with a flat, unimpressed look. “Try to keep your temper to yourself while I am gone,” Sjurd says, “I have no wish to owe an Earl for a damaged slave. Not when we have just mended him.”

Now Ulfkell steps back, letting Sjurd’s hand fall. “With all of your other imagined debts, what difference would that make?”

Sjurd sighs. “It was for helping me that everything came worse for them, Ulfkell. I can no more ignore my own role in this than I can abandon them to their fate. ‘A good reputation will not die for the man who earns it.’”

“Fate. Debt,” Ulfkell scoffs, “Is it not yet repaid? All our medicine gone, the little food we had for our winter stores. The crops are ruined by the heat, the flood has taken the hunting.” He jabs two fingers into Sjurd’s chest. “This debt of yours will starve us long before we can gain repayment on our losses from an outlaw. Ragnar Lothbrok is a dead man. And now so are we.” He shoulders Sjurd out of the way and, despite being a head taller, Sjurd staggers.

Neither spares another glance at Athelstan, but the sudden tension in the air is thick as a coming thunderstorm and Athelstan's body responds to it as a man does by instinct to the near rumbling of thunder - he shrinks into himself. Ragnar and Rollo fought like this, both turning from light to dark in this same way over the treasure Rollo stole. Athelstan rubs at the nape of his neck and looks about again at the unnatural stillness of the farm. The cow is gone, the henhouse door is open to a quiet void. It is well before the slaughtering time, not even yet harvest, and already there is nothing more in the whole of the place to reap or to kill. Condemning any man to slow starvation in reward for a good deed is galling. The children being left with an unpayable debt is worse still. It seems that everywhere Athelstan goes, trouble follows.

“You exaggerate, as usual,” Sjurd is arguing. “And what would you expect me to do otherwise? Send them off alone on a months’-long journey just as winter sets in?” Ulfkell tosses the well-bucket to the bottom of the hole and Sjurd raises his voice over the splashing and clanking as Ulfkell drags it up again. “Throw them in the sea and bid them swim home and good luck? If you are seeking sure repayment, we would certainly earn it that way. Vengeful fathers are _excellent_ debtors.”

The bucket’s iron binding resounds from the edging stones in a single, clear note. Ulfkell grabs it and empties it into the other. His hands drip with clear water and he wipes one across his tattooed head, scrubbing at the back of his neck, then flicks his fingers, propelling an arc of droplets through the breaking sunlight. “Ah,” he spits out, kicking the well-cover into place, “you do what you choose.”

“’A fool stays awake all night worrying about everything. He is tired when the morning comes and all his problems remain unsolved.’”

“Cousin, you stuff your head full of Odin’s proverbs as a desperate man stuffs his prick into a harlot; it all comes out emptier than it entered.”

Athelstan chokes. The red flush that works its way up his neck and into his cheeks is fever hot. He leans down and fidgets with his trousers at the knee, pretending a different kind of discomfort behind the veil of his lank hair. That is how Rollo planned to use his gold plate, his stolen part of the spoils, not spent on anything useful but to be divided up instead for the transient company of paid women. Yet there is something in it - in Rollo’s gold plate - something that Athelstan is failing to grasp. And then he realises.

“Lagertha has your payment.” He isn’t sure they hear him at first - they stand a fair few paces away and Athelstan doesn’t have the breath to speak loudly. “Ragnar’s goods may be forfeit, but _hers_ are not. Are they?” He trails off, uncertain of himself in the face of Sjurd’s sudden intense stare. Ulfkell has already dismissed him in favour of scratching Agni’s ears as the dog winds underfoot.

“Not hers,” Sjurd agrees, “but what could she have left? A few dresses and beads cannot feed us through the snows.”

Athelstan laughs, incredulous. “Did Bjorn not tell you that she went with? To England.”

“He did. And so?” Sjurd’s eyes narrow.

“She did not go as a _cook_.”

“Yes?” Sjurd spits, frustration turning to impatience. “It is not your place to speak in riddles, slave.”

“Lagertha went as a warrior. She earned a warrior’s share of the spoils. And _her_ goods are not forfeit,” he says, clipping his words in his own irritation. And _this_ raid was sanctioned. Earl Haraldson would take a big risk confiscating anything this time.

It is not a guarantee by any means, but all the same Sjurd smirks and claps Ulfkell a huge blow on the back that echoes through the humid air. “You see?”

Ulfkell does not even rock on his feet. If possible, his sour expression compacts even further. “On the word of a slave?”

“On the word of a slave or a talking beast,” Sjurd throws his arms wide, “if the Norns have decreed it so, shall it not be?”

“The Norns object to your talking so loudly at daybreak.” Ulfkell squats beside Agni and scrubs both of his hands deep into the fur behind the little pointed ears. “And for now it changes nothing. We cannot eat promises.”

“We do the best we can, Cousin.”

It seems to Athelstan that there is an apology in Sjurd’s words, affirmed when Ulfkell’s face softens and he accepts it as such with a short nod directed at Sjurd’s knees.

Sjurd’s pats Ulfkell’s shoulder. There might be a minute squeeze of his fingertips before he spins on his heel and paces towards the gap in the northern boundary fence, whistling Agni after him.

Ulfkell watches them go, his hands drooping forgotten in the dust. The dawn continues its upward blaze, a forest afire reaching up to a line of thin grey clouds. A spark catches them and a thread of gold sweeps along the bottom edge. “You are sure about this, Not-a-Wolf? Many a young man has sought his wealth a-viking and returned empty-handed, or one-handed, or not at all.”

Sjurd slips past the fence and starts up the worn track through empty grassland. His shape bobs up the gentle slope of the hill until he crests it onto the heath proper.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

It was several days after Ragnar left that Athelstan finally realised just how much information he had drawn out of him during that one drunken conversation. Him, innocently hoping that it was a gesture of friendship - or, at the least, of friendliness - and desperate to gain ground towards safety with an unreadable foe, allowed Ragnar to tease from him everything that he wanted to know. Even his first shocked understanding, when Ragnar stated his intentions to the Earl, was nowhere near the whole of it. He had given Ragnar everything - Hexham, King Aella, their every vulnerability - in bits and pieces, in rambling sentences, encased in anecdote and fumbling, forgotten Norse but there all the same. Easy enough for a man like Ragnar to pick out each of those tiny strands and tie them together into a net to trap them all. And now here Athelstan is hoping for the sake of the enemy that his betrayal has had success. The sickness of those first days and weeks comes rushing back. Who is he now? And who will he be in five days, or six, once Earl Haraldson claims him as property?


	26. Chapter 26

The fourth day after Sjurd leaves, Gyda quite literally drags Athelstan out into the yard, where the sun blazes down the dregs of its summer gold. They settle on a bench beneath the longhouse eaves, the sun-warmed south wall at their backs, with the basket of Gyda’s mending between them on the knotted board.

“I don’t know how I will stand it,” she says, tilting her work into the light. “Kattegat.” With her head bowed, Athelstan can see only the half-closed slant of her eyelid, eyelashes sweeping down toward a cheek that is a close match in colour to the ash-white linen. She folds the garment around her hand, tugging the stitching taut and searching the seam with a concentrated squint. In the light, the stretching tree limbs dance a shadow-play across the cloth and Gyda’s fingers. “There are so many _people_.”

Athelstan thinks of the island of Paris, of streets heaving with crowds hemmed in by an ancient, crumbling wall and the wide blue arms of the Seine. Kattegat, on the other hand, is several times smaller even than Hexham. But after so long alone in his own mind, Athelstan too feels a nervous itch at the thought of it.

“I liked the farm,” Gyda goes on. “It was quiet, and every day was the same. And I will miss my goats.” Her voice wavers a little and she blinks hard. She tilts her face up to Athelstan. “What will we _do_ there? There is only a small garden, and no animals, and it’s so noisy.”

He grimaces at her use of ‘we’.

Seeing it, Gyda’s worry drops from her face, giving way to a stern stare. “If Mother has gold enough to repay our keep, like you said, then she has enough to buy you back from the Earl.”

He shakes his head. It hurts again today - a stabbing pain at the back that comes in unexpected waves. He is so tired of aching. “Gyda…” Whatever gold Lagertha has she will use sparingly: for her children, for Ragnar, to stay alive, to rebuild. Spending it on a slave she doesn’t need, to work a farm she doesn’t have…

But Gyda’s face only tightens further. “She will. Don’t argue. You said Christians have to have faith.”

“Faith in God, and not a blind one. We trust Him because we know Him.”

“Well you know me,” she says, with a light shrug. “Don’t you trust me?”

 _You are not a god_. But that isn’t what she means, so he keeps quiet.

She stitches in silence for a while - long enough for Athelstan to grow drowsy. The wall soaks heat into his aching bones and he shuts his eyes and lets his muscles loosen. The knot below his knee will not untie though, it pulls tighter as he lets his bare feet uncurl on the hot dust.

“Did you always hate living on the farm?” she asks.

He contemplates this from the shuttered security of his half-sleep. His feelings are difficult to untangle from each other. He has teased free some loose ends over the months, but not yet enough to fully understand his own thoughts. “No,” he answers in the end, opening his eyes and blinking up at the eaves. The wooden shingles poke out over the final beam in a not-quite-uniform line, like teeth.

“You didn’t hate _us_?”

“You and Bjorn? Of course not. Why would I?” Bjorn _has_ been hateful and frustrating and challenging, but that has been good for Athelstan, in many ways. “As to what you will do,” he sits up again, “you will find the good in it. There will be things that you hate, but there will be things you like better too. You only have to choose what you spend your time thinking on.”

Gyda contemplates this in silence, completing a short row of tiny, matching stitches along one broken seam. “What did you find, that was better?”

Athelstan hesitates, not because he must think hard to find something, but because - in the end - there is so much to choose from. “I like the trees,” he says first, because there they are in front of him - the shining green of a year’s first shoots, singing a quieting hush in the breeze like a lullaby. “I know that sounds silly,” he admits, in response to Gyda’s lifted eyebrow. “But I grew up in the forest and that was one thing I always missed on Lindisfarne. There aren’t many there - it’s too windy, and we needed the space for fields. I like the mountains. If I don’t have to climb over them. I like having enough sleep, enough food. Shoes,” he adds, lifting one ironic bare foot and wriggling his toes in the balmy air, “sunlight.” His new wooden cross slips about inside his tunic and he lifts a hand to it, fitting his palm about the odd shape in such a familiar motion it is as if it has always been there. He flits Gyda a mischievous smile. “And friendship with other tree monsters.”

She laughs, her pale cheeks turning a still-too-pale shade of rose. “You still look like one.” She tugs at one of his curls, pulling out a stem of golden straw. “I should cut your hair. And you need a shave, and a wash,” she says, as if she has just noticed these things, as if Athelstan’s smell has not been developing over the last several weeks like a well-aged cheese.

“When I can make it to the river without falling over.” He plucks at his linen tunic, now more stain than anything else. Through the thinning patches there hints the darker shadows of purple-black bruising covering a large expanse of his ribs. To tell truth, Athelstan has not yet had the courage to look. “This will take more than a bucket or two.”

“Would you stay with us in Kattegat, if you had a choice?” Gyda blurts out. The thought seems to come from nowhere and he must look as baffled as he feels because after a pause she goes on, “When Mother buys you back—”

 _“—If—_ ”

She rolls her eyes hard. “’ _If_ _’_ Mother buys you back, will you choose to stay with us?”

Athelstan squints at her, laughing a little at the absurdity of the question, nowhere near the point of understanding. “Where else would I go?”

Gyda stabs her needle into the linen, catching her thumb. She makes a noise of frustrated pain and sucks the tip of it between her teeth. “Because,” she mumbles around it, “we can set you free.”

He isn’t sure, to begin with, that he hears her properly. He stares at her open-mouthed with what he knows is an expression of unbecoming stupidity while his mind whirls, piecing sound into thought at a grinding pace. When the words drip through, his heart starts racing.

Gyda stares back with Ragnar’s all-encompassing blue eyes, waiting for a response.

"I… what?" is Athelstan's ever-eloquent answer. His breath draws short as if he has been running all day, though he has hardly moved from Gyda's watchful presence since Sjurd left.

She removes her thumb from between her teeth, presses down on the top of it, and blood beads up again in a single, bright ruby. She pinches it between finger and thumb of her left hand and waits for the flesh to turn yellow. “I wasn’t sure if it was true, but Bjorn said it was, that he saw one in Kattegat when he went to take his oath. A free-making.”

“I do not have twelve ounces of silver.”

"You don't need it if we free you 'without dues'. That's what Sjurd said. Then you don't need to do the freedom ale."

She has been finding out for him, he realises. But her kindness is a barbed arrow. His chest begins to ache. _“If_ Lagertha buys me,” he reminds her, tempering his voice into softness, feeling guilty beyond measure at having to disappoint her, “and _if_ she frees me and _if_ she does so without dues." He needs to breathe then and does so in a large hiss of air. "Those are some very large ifs, Gyda." They are mountain-sized conditionals, every bit as steep and treacherous as the monster over the river.

But Gyda’s eyes still carry the sparkle of a determined hope. “You saved our lives. At least twice each. I don’t see that you could do any more to deserve it.”

Athelstan braces his hand on the bench, turning towards her, yet looking away - down at her hands lying in her lap, the linen crunched in one fist. He says - fast, so she cannot object, “The world does not work that way. Deserving something and getting it have very little to do with each other.” He pushes himself to his feet and steps backwards. “I’ll fetch you a cloth before you ruin your mending.”

He makes it all the way to Gyda’s sleeping bench before his racing heart reaches a stuttering speed and his legs wobble into a full collapse. He lands between bundles of furs, one knee on the bench, one foot on the floor, the lip of the board cutting into his shin. His heart drums so hard and fast that it skips, and Athelstan kneads his palm into the centre of his chest in a vain attempt to subdue it. The skipped spaces between the beats are a crushing weight - Ulfkell’s boots on his chest - and he crumples, forehead to the mattress, his ribs fluttering out against his hand in a frantic beating of wings. This grief is unexpected. It hurts.

Hope hurts.

He cannot have it. All those ifs are impossibilities. Lagertha will not buy him - Athelstan would not buy _himself_ in these circumstances - and so all the rest snaps into dust in his hand like a termite-ridden stump.

On the other side of the wall, Gyda hums to herself, unshaken by his disbelief.

The ends of the pine branch mattress, protruding from beneath the blanket covering, tangle up in his hair in a grasping fist. Athelstan lies still and hurts.

The first time Athelstan lost his freedom there was a frost on the grass. It crunched beneath his toes at every footstep - a muted mimicry of the curled brown leaves that littered the forest floor all through that chill winter. But the forest was a long way behind them then, and the bare hills rolled on one after another, day after day. Then another hill rose, one long blue expanse stretching from one edge of sight to the other. It was, at first, just another haze of sky, only darker, but the colour deepened into the twinkling of an endless river that swept away into eternity. They stopped at the edge of it, Athelstan’s heels buried in the final stems of shimmering, frost-solid grass, his toes sinking down into wet sand. Across the vast expanse of the empty yellow strand, the island lay sleeping - a low form, adorned with ugly dune grass and small, hunched trees, headed at the far southern end by a rough circle of cold stone walling. He thought of running then, but his father took him by the arm and dragged him down onto the causeway without a word. The wading birds scattered around them, hopping away on light little feet while Athelstan’s sank down deep into the claggy sand, rising to his ankles with pools of clear ice-water. And on the far shore, a solitary, brown-robed figure stood watching.

There were many moments, later, that bound him into a life he had not chosen, but Athelstan has always considered that as the first, irrevocable turning point - that his fate was sealed the moment his feet touched the sand.

Gyda’s humming has turned into a little song. Her voice is thin and wavering, untrained and shy, and too forced to be unpurposed. He did not hide his emotions as well as he thought.

With an effort, Athelstan sits up and slips onto his knees on the floor, facing the bench. It almost feels like a prayer - head bowed and hands shaking, face to the dark wall - but it is far from prayer. Beneath the pine mattress, beneath the bench boards, Ulfkell’s leather pack sits in the same place Athelstan first saw it weeks ago. He pulls it out, dusts off a creeping spider and delves back inside the storage space. Within the dusty cocoon of wood, Gyda’s singing from the other side of the wall takes on a hollower quality, like singing through a seashell, and Athelstan becomes aware of his every noise. His heart is little calmer, and the thump of it against the edge of the boards feels loud, thrumming through the wood of the longhouse from end to end. His breathing seems to echo, every shallow gasp ringing on in his own ears. And he stifles it the way he did in the chapel that day, counting under his breath to the rhythm of Gyda’s lilting voice.

Besides the leather pack there are piles of blankets and spare clothing: winter linens, doubled for warmth; woollen mittens and hoods; two sheepskin tunics. He takes a blanket and leaves the rest - too easily missed, and worth too high a penalty - then slips the boards and mattress back into place.

Gyda’s song has changed to a counting rhyme for which she has forgotten half of the words. She might give up and come in soon.

The pack has more than enough room for the few things Athelstan has already collected and hidden beneath his own bench: the end of an aged brown cheese, an apple, a few odd pieces of dried rye bread. The other things, the more important things, will have to wait until the final moment. He rolls the food up in the blanket and stuffs the package down to the bottom of the pack. The empty space above it is confronting. Athelstan smooths the top fold of the blanket flat, his arm consumed up to the elbow, and slumps against the bench. The pack slumps with him, flopping against his quivering chest.

It is not too late to change his mind. There are so many reasons not to go - the coming winter being the largest of them, and how his surviving it will amount to pure luck. The tiny collection of food is an insignificant bump beneath his palm, little more than a few handfuls. And - the rushes scratch at his heels - he does not even have shoes.

The second time Athelstan lost his freedom there was a summer fog. During the rest period, Athelstan watched it gather from the dormitory window, seeping in with the rising tide. He was supposed to be in prayerful contemplation of Father Cuthbert's accusation of pride, but concentration was difficult through Cenwulf's snoring on the next cot so Athelstan stood leaning on the stone sill and staring out across the scruffy-grassed dunes to the sea. Far beyond the rolling clouds of fog, as they built themselves into a wall along the eastern edge of the island, a tiny black shape - little more than a blot on the horizon - bobbed on the sea swells, low to the water. Athelstan took it for a whale, and so, when the little bell rang to summon them to their duties, he dropped his scrutiny of it without further thought, abandoning his poor pretence at penance, and filed down the steps with the rest of the bleary-eyed brothers.

All through the long hours of work that afternoon, the fog swept in onto the shore. And with it came the Norsemen on their dragon-prowed boat.

Athelstan clutches at the pack. He will not wait, this time, until he is dragged onto the sand.

The woods here are a mix of birch and oak, like those at Ragnar’s farm, the trees short and slanted on the upper slopes of the little hill but ranging taller as it descends until they come to an abrupt end at the carved-out space of the yard.

Stepping past the privy into the fringe of the trees is a relief. Athelstan weaves through trunks of grey and white as fast as he is able with the limping pain of the wolf bite radiating through his knee, putting behind him a confusion of shape and colour until he reaches the uncleared undergrowth several metres in. There, the brambles twist up in wild knots, the nettles' flowering spires peeping through the spiked arches. And Athelstan takes an abrupt step left behind a wide oak and puts his back to it, pressing into it hard enough that his shoulders hug the shape of the trunk, and clutching the pack to his chest. His heart thunders, waiting for angry voices to follow him, or for Gyda’s confused calling. The birds witter on in the canopy above, and behind him, from atop the privy, the herring gull croaks. Feet sinking down into the dusty flakes of last winter’s leaves, Athelstan lays his head back and listens.

Nothing else happens.

The breeze riffles through the trees, ruffling the birches’ feather-like tops and bringing with it the sound of Bjorn’s far-away laughter. There might be fish tonight.

"We will not have to eat you after all," Athelstan says, listening to the herring gull's big feet pattering across the privy roof. And after a time, he eases into a more restful silence and steps back to examine the tree. Lightning struck, the trunk has split down the middle as clean as a piece of firewood beneath an axe and the weaker half has fallen to one side, arching up against the ground. This half forms a useful step and Athelstan shoulders the pack and hauls himself up, curling fingers and toes into the deep furrows of the old oak's skin. His body, long neglected and well-bruised, bursts into a discordant aching the moment his weight leaves the ground. His shoulder and knee cramp tight and his climbing becomes less of the smooth rise he was hoping for and more the fumbling clamber of a spider with several smashed legs. He pauses on top of the oak's arch and grabs at his shoulder, pressing his fingers between the pack and his shoulder blade and digging the tips into the knotted muscle. The hot, swollen lump has receded into a tender warmth that Athelstan can no longer find the true margin of, rising to a truer pain in the centre where the wound still sends occasional sharp signals of pain. He rolls his shoulder back and forth and waits for the knot to ease, then leans down and rubs at his knee. When he can move again without such sharp protestations as before, Athelstan finds handholds on the lightning-sliced face of the trunk and picks his way up to the next branch. This one runs out parallel to the ground, broader than Athelstan's shoulder-width and ending in an upward spray of smaller limbs. He limps along it. The sensation is pleasant - the way the flesh of his bare feet moulds along every crack and crevice of the bark, and each small swaying movement of the leaves in the breeze hums through it and up into Athelstan’s bones. The tree breathes and moves and lives, and Athelstan can feel it.

At the far end of the bough, Athelstan slips the pack off and hooks it by the straps into the leafy nest. That will be enough, he hopes, to keep it hidden until he needs it.

Three days, Ulfkell said. Even if the message has reached Kattegat, Rollo and Lagertha cannot arrive until late tomorrow.

He needs to leave tonight.

Athelstan sits down, dangling his legs over the side of the branch. The handle of his utility knife jabs up into the soft hollow of his stomach and he swipes it out of the way with a palm, closing his fingers around it. Through the trees to his left, the smoke of the hearth fire curls up from the roof of the longhouse, dissipating into a mist as the breeze catches it.

"I am no oath-breaker now," he whispers, settling the guilty twist in his gut. "Sjurd will see to it." Athelstan's responsibility is dissolved, and he is free now to run and risk the penalty only for that.

Over the river, the forested ridge reaches northwest, past Floki’s ruined house and on and on out of sight towards the big lake, set within the endless ranges of the northern mountains that tracked them their journey here. While to the northeast the heath spreads away from the farm to an unknown horizon in a boundless sea of stunning purple. And if Athelstan is unsure of anything now, it is only which way he should choose.

“Athelstan?” Gyda’s call springs up on the breeze, muffled by distance. In the yard, her figure appears past the longhouse, wandering out in the direction of the well. The drooping blue tunic gives her away, but the familiar shape of her movements - her light, almost dancing step - would be enough even without it. She is not worried yet, looking about by spinning in lazy circles as she walks, toes pointed and sweeping. “Athelstan! There are fish. Come help.”

It strikes him now that this will be his last meal with them - the last time he will stand shoulder to shoulder at the workbench, or sit knee to knee at the table, his eyes bleary and neck aching over some tedious chore. This will be the last time he has to shrug off Bjorn's teasing or intervene in an argument over a ruined tale. That is an altogether different grief - less urgent perhaps, but no less deep.

Climbing down is easier than up, more of a controlled slip-slide than any real effort and then Athelstan is picking his way back around the trees until he comes to the privy - the little wattle structure sitting far back from the house, behind the stable. He slips inside and waits a few moments with inheld breath, peering through the gaps in the door. A figure appears from behind the henhouse, wandering across the yard in the direction of the longhouse, and Athelstan swings the door open and limps out. The door clacks shut behind him and Sjurd turns towards the noise.

Athelstan stops in surprise. "You made good time," he croaks, in a tone he hopes conveys only his surprise and not the runaway panic that mists his mind. Too early, too early, and how will Athelstan get away now with two watchers instead of one? And what if tonight is now already too late?

“There is fish!” Sjurd says, not showing any signs of having noticed. “Or so I have heard. And I have provisions to store too. So come put yourself to good use. The quicker we work, the quicker I can tell all. And there is much to tell!”


	27. Chapter 27

The moment Sjurd finishes his meal, sitting back from the table with a satisfied grunt, Bjorn shoves his own food aside with a reckless swipe and leans forward over the trestle boards, cupping his flailing hands together like a boy at lessons trying not to fidget.

"Well?!" In his fervour, he bites the word short and his teeth clack shut on the red tip of his tongue. He winces, sucking it into his cheek.

Sjurd huffs in response. “’Well?’, he says, as if he doesn’t know that a man must begin a tale properly.” He swipes his knife blade clean on his trousers and slips it back into the sheath on his belt. Then he winks at Gyda, who sits beside him at the table, her feet pulled up onto the bench, picking at her fish around her hugged knees. “For our success,” he says, raising his voice at the same time he raises his cup, “we should thank the Gods.”

Athelstan, squashed in between Bjorn and the rear partition wall, looks down into his own cup and swirls the ale about, contemplating the resulting eddy with a frown. His body itches with the need to move, with the need to slow time down and speed it up all at once. The lowering light - now that the sun has slipped behind the mountains - begins its retreat across the floor of the longhouse, marking the time in incremental shifts of grey-blue twilight across the workbench. Sjurd’s new sack of flour, placed below the string of onions halfway along, marks what would have been Vespers, a lifetime ago. Here it is the start of the true evening, and Ulfkell is already lighting the few reed lamps against the waning light inside, though there will be only a few hours of true dark outside. That might be both a blessing and a curse tonight.

“We will make a sacrifice as soon as we get to Kattegat,” Bjorn says, raising his cup to Sjurd’s, and he gives in to his nervous energy by jabbing his elbow much harder than necessary into Athelstan’s side. “Maybe we can give one to your god, too, if you like? A chicken, or a woodpigeon or something. Just a little one.”

Athelstan smiles and shakes his head, playing along. Lying. “I do not think your mother would allow it.” And Athelstan will be gone tonight, taking Bjorn’s axe and fire-making kit and heading…he hasn’t decided yet. He might not know until he runs. _When_ to run, that is most important.

With the reed lamps burning in their places on the shelves and the fire high in the hearth, the longhouse takes on the comfortable yellow glow of evening: moon- and star-lit from the inside. Ulfkell slides the last lamp back into its place on the shelf above his sleeping bench.

"And what success is it, that we have had the luck of?" he asks. The lamp's flame wriggles in the draft of his voice. He wipes the pad of his thumb along the edge of the oil well, then turns and drops into his place, propping his feet up on the hearthstones in a position that is too stiff to mistake for relaxed. "Do tell, cousin."

As usual in the face of Ulfkell’s temper, Sjurd dismisses it with a grin. “Since you ask - and I note the insincerity with which you do so - I have passed on the message to our acquaintance and he promises to deliver it when he next sails to Kattegat. _And_ you have the pleasure of my company several days early, for which - I also note - you do not seem to be grateful.”

“Pah." Ulfkell settles further back against the wall, linking his hands behind his head and letting his elbows fall outwards. His beard waggles up and down as if he is chewing over his words, but he says nothing more.

“When will he go?” Bjorn asks, voicing the same question that is on Athelstan’s mind.

“In a few weeks. This will be his last voyage of the season - to Kattegat first, then on to Ribe and Hedeby, and he wants a full cargo for it.”

A pressure he did not know was there releases from Athelstan’s chest and he slumps down over his cup, sighing into it with a breath that ruffles the surface like a dropped stone in a puddle. That gives him time again, time to think, which has been precious lacking ever since the flood.

Gyda drops one leg below the table and prods her toes into the arch of Athelstan’s bare foot, raising an eyebrow at him. ‘Aren’t you happy now?’ her expression asks. She is misunderstanding his relief, and he can hear the ‘told-you-so’ tone with clarity even without the words. She still clings, with a childish stubbornness, to her belief that everything will turn out well for him. And maybe she is right - she knows Lagertha better than he does - but Athelstan cannot risk the overwhelming odds that she is wrong.

He smiles back again. ‘Of course.’ Lying again. His oath is fulfilled as near as he can get it: there is nothing else he can do to further it, no more need to be involved. But ‘happy’ has had little to do with his decisions since memory began.

“You are still trusting our fate to Einarr the Blind," Ulfkell says, sniffing and tightening his face as if noticing a foul smell. “I hope for all our sakes you wrote it down or it will never get anywhere in any recognisable state. That man has more ale than blood in him.”

Gyda pinches another tiny flake of meat from her half-eaten fish. “I made a rune stick,” she says and drops the food on her tongue with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. In fact, most of her meal is unfinished, and not from excited tension like Bjorn, who now reaches his arm across Athelstan’s and tears off a handful of pan bread from his plate, stuffing it into his cheek with a mouthful of ale.

“Well, then let us hope he does not drop it overboard along with what is left of his mind,” Ulfkell mutters.

Athelstan slides Bjorn’s plate back in front of him and prods the ignored parsnip to the front. Gyda’s cheek, resting on her hand, has blushed to sunset red between the thin lines of her fingers. Probably from the ale, or the heat of the fire, or the evening’s excitement. She shakes her head at his stare, a tiny tug of her chin against her palm.

“I trust Einarr more than all the others,” Sjurd is saying, dismissing Ulfkell’s concern with a flick of his hand.

“To wager our lives upon? If he leaves too late, there will be no little faering rowing up the waves to rescue anyone before next summer. And what will we eat for all of that time? And how will we pay for it? You have already taken all my hacksilver. You have already sold my dog." There is a sharp silence. Athelstan imagines the clipping of little claws on the rushes and his heart clenches a little for the absence, for Ulfkell's loss. Ulfkell goes back to staring at the roof beams, at the gathering darkness that begins in the very apex of the rafters and drifts down towards them - a palpable thing, a black fog. It was not Agni's fault that they were running out of food.

Perhaps Sjurd was thinking the same, because he tilts his head in acquiescence, his mouth straightening to something resembling a sombre look. “Then it is a good thing that we do not rely upon a little faering. And if everyone will cease their interruptions, perhaps I can proceed to the most important part of the tale. There is news." Sjurd pours himself more ale from the jug on the table and takes a long drink from his cup before placing it down with a gentle tap on the boards.

Beside Athelstan, Bjorn stiffens with a tension that could explode either into excitement or an attempt to strangle Sjurd for taking so long to speak. He seems close to chewing his tongue off in biting it quiet.

“It is by no means sure,” Sjurd dips his head and extends a finger from his cup in pointed warning, “it came in by one boat a few days before I arrived and the rumour has gone about town now enough times to be embellished beyond the original tale. For all I know,” he continues in the face of Bjorn’s impatient stare, “the whole of it could be untrue from start to finish.”

“Just tell already, Sjurd, or they will die of waiting instead.”

Sjurd looks over the rim of his cup at Bjorn, who leans so close over the table that he hovers a little way above his seat, then at Gyda, still chewing on the same little bit of fish. "Well, it seems that Ragnar Lothbrok the outlaw is now Ragnar Lothbrok… _Earl_ of the _Vestfold_.”

Bjorn drops back onto the bench so hard that he almost falls off backwards. Teetering, he grabs Athelstan’s arm to catch himself, fingers clawing into the muscle above Athelstan’s elbow.

Gyda’s mouth drops open in a slow, silent gasp.

Everything changes if this is true. Everything.

In the face of their speechlessness, Athelstan gathers the mess of his own thoughts, leans forward and asks, "How?" His fingers clench in a death-grip around his cup, Bjorn's squeeze tighter about his arm. Once again it seems as if the world has been picked up and shaken to pieces and Athelstan is left with a mess of light and colour that he must fit back together again without knowing what it should look like.

Ragnar might set him free. No - and he digs his fingernails into the grain of the wooden cup - he will not, not ever while Athelstan is useful. But he _might_. Is that enough?

“Earl Haraldson isn’t sick,” Bjorn says, letting go of Athelstan’s arm at last and squinting the way he does when he is deep in confusion. “He’s just old.”

Ulfkell snorts. “Age and illness are the least likely things to get rid of an Earl.”

Sjurd agrees with a gruff hum. “By the account I heard, Earl Haraldson is dead and on his way to Hel, unless Odin saw fit to grant him entry to Valhalla from a holmgang.”

Bjorn freezes, his arm hanging in mid-air, and his face blanches a pure white so that the freckles across the bridge of his nose stand out as sudden bruises. His eyes flick across the table and catch Gyda’s.

She shakes her head in frantic denial, dislodging her chin from her hand. “Oh no,” she whispers.

Athelstan looks from one to the other, quite unable to follow what is happening. “What is a _holmgang_?”

“Trial by combat,” Bjorn answers, breathless and stuttering, though he is looking at Sjurd. “Are you _sure_?”

“As I said…” Sjurd shrugs. “We must await further news. Or the arrival of an Earl on our little shore. But, it seemed true or I would not have told it.”

Bjorn grabs at the edge of the trestle board in a white-knuckle grip and leans back, locking his elbows in a position of half-fight, half-flight. Below the table, his knees jiggle up and down because of the frantic tapping of his heels against the rushes. And Athelstan can see the thought running through his head: how easily rumour might name the _wrong_ dead man. For a while, it seems he might get up and leave - work out his distraction by pacing up and down the yard - instead, Bjorn swallows several times, throat bobbing, and by slow degrees composes himself again. “Does that mean,” he says, his voice trembling and slow, “that we get Earl Haraldson’s hall? And all of his things?”

“If it is true, I suppose it does.”

Bjorn nods to himself, and his breath picks up into a nervous, panting laugh. "Earl of the Vestfold." He droops forward again, collapsing against the table in boneless disbelief, and slips his fingers through his over-long fringe of hair, keeping his head upright with a palm against his forehead. He scratches at his head. "I will never have to muck out the pigs again. Gyda, you would never have to grind grain again." He pauses with his mouth still open and turns his bright-eyed gaze to Athelstan. "And Athelstan gets his freedom."

Gyda grins, her cheeks dimpling into small red apples. “See?” And she kicks Athelstan in the ankle. “I told you so.”

There is a choking lump in his throat that will not go away. He wants to believe it. He wants to embrace the small, glowing hope that begins in the pit of his stomach like the first promise of a sunrise. Ragnar will never set him free. But what if he _does_?

Athelstan could go _home_.

He should not embrace it, he should stamp it back down, this aching hope. Has he not already learned this lesson today? But like the inevitable morning, it rises anyway, the warm rays of its brightness bursting up into his chest hot as a summer's midday. And it hurts, but in the way that healing wounds do when the skin knits together again and muscles burn on re-use. It is a strengthening pain.

And Bjorn, still laughing, reaches across the table and grips Gyda’s chin, pinching it between thumb and forefinger.

She pulls backwards, swiping at his outstretched arm. “Get off.”

“Gyda? Are your eyes yellow?”

And Athelstan’s stomach drops to the floor.

***

He runs. Sigeric's howl of pain whistles in his ears and the largest toe on Athelstan's right foot thuds. Sandals weren’t making for kicking with. One of the novices - a sickly, pointy-faced new youth called Bertred - turns in wide-eyed startlement at the sudden commotion, sees Athelstan’s fleeing and throws out an arm to stop him. Athelstan ducks under his long, flapping sleeve and keeps going, sandals thudding over the rutted surface of the field, raising up clouds of fine brown dust. He pants it in and coughs it back out, wiping his sleeve over his face and smearing sticky tears across the rounds of his cheeks.

The work party is in a clamour now - a collection of shocked exclamations and high laughter - but it fades fast behind him. No one chases. Sigeric’s pride especially keeps him from the indignity of running and he resorts to shouting threats and promises at Athelstan’s retreating back. As if he cares.

"Shut. Up," Athelstan pants under his breath, "you stupid… ugly… bowl-nosed… eunuch." 'Eunuch' is a new word that Cenwulf told him in a whisper a few days past, his face all pinched up in disgust but his eyes gleaming, though he couldn't explain exactly what the meaning of it was. Athelstan has been waiting to use it.

A row of unpicked cabbages rears up in front of his feet out of nowhere and trips him headlong into the dirt. He lands in a sprawled mess, his knee stinging, skinned through the thin wool of his trousers. A titter rises from the youngest oblates in the watching crowd, though it is quickly hushed, and Athelstan's face stings with an even deeper humiliation than before. He scrambles back to his feet, embarrassment fending off the worst of the pain for the time being. His sandals have flown off somewhere, and he isn't inclined to find them so he stomps away barefoot.

Could Sigeric not have told him anywhere else? Anger swells up inside his ribs, filling up his chest until he cannot breathe except in snotty, sobbing gasps. He doesn’t know where he is going. The tide is up. The little birch copse sits between him and the priory.

"I want… to go… _home,_ ” he sniffs, all to himself. For almost a year Athelstan has avoided saying it. And now that he has, he wants to swallow the words back down again. Speaking it only feeds the pain in his heart, growing it larger and larger. It throbs with a bone-deep, soul-deep agony, worse than any of Sigeric’s whippings, worse than broken bones. It hurts like his heart is tearing.

He can never go home.

Athelstan bursts through the undergrowth and into the trees.

The woods behind Sjurd's longhouse appear different beneath the moonlight. What was a floor composed of a hundred variations of green and brown is now only light and shadow. Depth and height are muted into obscurity and Athelstan finds himself tripping over air in his quest to find the solid ground. The lightning-split oak throws back a strange night-time face, an unfamiliar creature in the dark. Athelstan finds his way up it by memory. The pack is right where he left it, sitting in a nest of leaves, blue-black as raven feathers. He snatches it up and drops it to the ground.

There are brambles everywhere, winding through the shrubs and beneath the leafy floor. Athelstan stumbles through them blind, the pack flapping on his back. The spikes stab into his feet, sharp and hard as nails, and snatch at his clothing. He tears himself free and goes on, following the moonlit path between the slender birch trees up the slope of the hill until he crests it and trips out into clear grassland.

His clothing ripples in a sudden wind, taking Athelstan back a step. And with his gasping breaths, the taste of brine fills his mouth and nose and slips cold down into his lungs. He goes on. This is no meadow grass, but tough, thick dune grass, anchored into sandy soil with rope-like roots. The ground beneath it ebbs and flows like the sea swells. Here and there his heel slips down the entrance of a rabbit hole, stumbling him, and his leg begins to ache.

As he walks, the ground changes in gradual degrees from gritty earth to slippery sand, tingling up between his toes and sticking to the blood on his heels in tacky circles. He wades through it, his slithering footsteps accompanied by the chirruping of grasshoppers in the waving fronds, until at last, the dunes rise in a final breaking wave and crest onto the shore.

Athelstan drops to the ground between the tall, silent swells of sand and digs his heels forward beneath the cool grains. He rests his arms around his knees.

Far ahead, at the edge of the east, the sun is just beginning to rise, sending out a trickle of molten gold north and south across a low, blue line that might be more land. But between here and there, the wide expanse of the sea sits waiting, furrowed in long plough-lines like a field awaiting planting. Southwest on this shore, it extends past the peaks of headland after headland - that giant’s hand that contains, in the hazy distance, the mouth of the fjord that leads into Kattegat. And Ragnar, who - if rumour is to be believed - is even now sitting in the Earl's seat in the Great Hall. And to the northeast, the coast slips on in a hazy line towards the little trading town where Sjurd's friend sits idle with a message. All of these pieces on the board, so close together, yet so far apart. And here Athelstan sits in the very centre.

The merchant lived, in the end. Though Eldwyn dragged him from death’s grip with the smell of the grave lingering on him and more skeleton than man.

Athelstan slips his new cross over his head, weighing it in the palm of his hand. It is lighter and cruder and more fragile than the one Eldwyn gave him, and in reality, he could snap it into kindling in a moment. Yet this is here, and the other is not, and who knows how long it will last. Perhaps it is not the heaviness of a thing that gives it permanence. He draws his utility knife from his belt, flipping the cross over to show what should be the front - with the crosspiece on top. Gyda’s runes scratch against his fingertips at the back. He presses the point of the blade to the wood.

The breeze drifts in from the shore, bringing the rolling hum-and-crash of waves across the sand and the gulls' restless crying from the cliffs. The sea is the giant’s sleeping breath, rumbling in and sighing out. It slips up the sand on the rippling edge of the wave, dissolves into a spreading foam and then - at the moment of translucence - seems to hold its quaking breath, leaving a skin of shimmering silver.

If the world truly is a game, and the Norns move all around as they please, then Athelstan can take control of one piece and one piece only: himself. He smooths his thumb over the cross, sweeping away dust and splinters. And it is time to make his final move.


	28. Chapter 28

Athelstan finds Bjorn in the yard, leaning against one of the log fence posts and throwing stones at a fat-stemmed dandelion that peeks up between the well's edging stones. His head is down, showing just the round sun of his hair, and one of his shoes has come untied, the leather lacing drooping in the dust. He must be deep in his own mind because he doesn't notice Athelstan's presence until he drops the leather pack by Bjorn's foot.

Bjorn starts then, looking up and jerking back, his elbow slipping from the fence post. Catching sight of Athelstan, his expression performs an ambiguous back-and-forth between tight irritation and relaxed relief. “Where have you been?” he bites out, settling somewhere in the middle, with his forehead scrunched over damp eyes. “You didn’t have permission to leave.”

“I know,” Athelstan gives an apologetic smile, clapping his hand on the top board of the fence, close to Bjorn’s arm. “I needed to think.”

Bjorn kicks the pack with the side of his foot. All the small weight is in the bottom, so it folds around his foot in a second shoe, and he has to kick it off again. "You're running away?" Athelstan expected some measure of anger, but Bjorn's voice carries only a hint of disappointment.

“When I belonged to Earl Haraldson, yes,” Athelstan says, allowing himself a wry twist to his smile. “Wouldn’t you?”

Bjorn snorts. He pinches another tiny stone between thumb and forefinger and throws it. It bounces on the dandelion’s leaf and down the well. “Probably. But not now?”

“Now I belong to Ragnar again. Or you, on his behalf.”

This isn't an answer, but Bjorn doesn't call attention to that. Instead, he shoves away from the fence and takes to pacing back and forth the length of the boards in sharp, agitated steps. This release of pent-up frustration is a startling reminder of those first few weeks on Ragnar's farm when Bjorn's frustration at being left behind and his hatred of Athelstan boiled out of every twitching muscle.

Athelstan wonders if Bjorn will ever learn to contain himself as Ragnar does, compressing all that tension into an ominous stillness. He reaches for his cross again, smoothing his thumb along the hard edges of the runes. “She swallowed the river water, that is what made her sick.”

Bjorn pauses in his pacing, kicking his foot back and forth on a line, unable to stay quite still. His laces drag in the dirt, following his scudding footfall with a wispy noise. “Yes, you said.”

“She will not get better on her own now.” She is dying, as surely as the merchant was dying until Eldwyn’s miracle pulled him back. “She needs a different medicine.”

There is no surprise in Bjorn’s reaction - he simply swallows and nods. “There are good healers in Kattegat, but…”

“She cannot wait until then,” Athelstan finishes for him.

"And we cannot pay for one until then," Bjorn mutters, with a sudden, intense frustration that betrays the fact that he has thought all this through already. Has he been out here all night, as Athelstan has, trying to hope up a solution? "So, what are we to do?" And he looks to Athelstan, throat bobbing, shoulders shrugging up into a tight hunch. His eyes are wide open, fearful and desperate, and he does not wipe away a tear that trickles down his nose, though he sniffs back the next. "We cannot buy everything with the _promise_ of gold.”

Athelstan nods. He sits down, holding onto the fence boards while he bends and straightens his aching leg, sliding into something of a relaxed position with it stretched out in front, but not quite able to keep the grimace from his face at his discomfort. He waves away Bjorn’s frown.

"There are monks in Ribe still, last I heard," Athelstan says. "They have a plant called wormwood, brought over from England, and before that from Rome." Athelstan knows - it was him that brought it, at Eldwyn's sending, clutching it close as a small child to his chest the whole voyage. "I would be surprised if they did not trade it by now, though since only they grow it, it will be expensive. And you would need a healer too, one who knows how to administer it without killing." And that Athelstan does _not_ know.

“Even more expense, Athelstan, how does this help us?”

Athelstan’s heart is thumping again, so hard it feels as if the ground itself is shaking with it. “There is another choice.” _‘Be obedient to your master as to the Lord’_. He could never have imagined, all that time ago in Lindisfarne, or standing at the top of the hill looking down at the place he hated - _hated_ and wanted destroyed - that he would ever have to make this decision. He could never have imagined being willing to do so. But Bjorn was right, back beneath the overhang, angry at Athelstan’s refusal to speak the truth. He hadn’t been able to admit it then, not even to himself, that he didn’t hold on because of the oath Ragnar forced him to make.

“What choice? _We_ have no silver, _Sjurd_ has no silver, there is nothing left to trade. Unless we all plan to go naked and eat air.”

Athelstan licks dry lips. He makes several false starts, mouth open yet wordless, then shutting it again with a snap. His pounding, clenching heart, squeezed in a fist in his chest, isn't due only to fear now. "You can trade me," he says at last, grateful that his voice is whole and sure, despite the rest of him.

For a long breath, Bjorn doesn’t react. Then he blinks hard and utters a stern, “No.”

“Bjorn—”

"No," Bjorn says again, his voice rising towards a shout. He swipes his arm in a cutting motion across his chest, "I forbid it. Think of something else."

Sighing, Athelstan leans back against the fence board, stretching his leg out in front of him. “What else is there?”

“I don’t know. But not that!” And Bjorn kicks out at him.

It isn’t a hard kick, more a wild swipe of his foot, and Athelstan fends it off with a palm and grabs Bjorn’s arm in the same movement, pulling him down. Bjorn collapses against Athelstan’s side, breathing hard. Athelstan lets him slump there in silence, waiting for him to work through his thoughts, to lash out again.

But Bjorn only drops his head into his hands, his chin to his chest and says, “Gyda would kill me.” His shuddering breath thrums through Athelstan’s shoulder, matching the erratic thudding of his heart.

“At least she would be alive to do it.”

And Bjorn chokes. He twists away, pressing his forehead into the splintered side of the board, his palm covering the otherwise exposed half of his face, panting as if he has just run a race.

Athelstan doesn't move to comfort him. This is not the time for comfort, and Bjorn would hate him for it. "You need to sell me," he repeats instead, and it is easier this time, in the way terrible things are once you stop fighting against them. This is like drowning. "It is not ideal. You will not get my full price in this state." He gestures at his leg and face, and though Bjorn still isn't looking his shoulders lift in accompaniment to his choking huff. "But it should buy what you need to keep her until Ragnar comes. And there will be one less mouth to feed in the meantime.”

“No,” Bjorn says again, the trembling word muffled by his palm. Still, he doesn’t look around.

The sky is turning from grey to blue in such gradual strokes that Athelstan only now sees the colour in it, long after the first glow of the sun lit the horizon over the sea. The trees shiver with a silvery sound in the breeze that still brings the taste of salt to his lips.

"I do not remember my family, not truly," he says, so soft the words are like a breeze themselves, and Bjorn lowers his hand from his face and begins pulling up handfuls of grass from the other side of the fence. "I have… shadows, feelings, but no faces. And Lindisfarne was not… monks should be a family of a sort, that is why we are named so. 'Brother Athelstan'," he laughs. How strange that sounds, now.

A smile twitches at the corner of Bjorn's mouth, but he flattens it again in a moment, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth.

"But we were not a family," Athelstan goes on, "there were many problems there, and we were warned—that is not important. What I mean is, I have never really had a family. But you and Gyda, you are." That is why he held on in the flood, why he caught Bjorn in his fall, why he could not leave them until he was forced to. It was never about duty; it was never about an oath. What began as an obligation the day that Ragnar left changed over time, such a slow transformation that he never knew of it, and he cannot now look back and point to a moment and say, 'Then'.

“And a man takes care of his family,” Bjorn says.

“Yes.” This is what his God wants, Rannveyg. Not blood, but self-sacrifice.

"How am I taking care of you if I sell you? Father made me promise, too, before he left, but I haven't done any of it the way I should."

“He will be proud of you.” Ragnar, who sailed West to certain death and fought a holmgang to snatch something better for his children, he knows what it is to risk giving everything away. Athelstan will not - cannot - forgive him for the bloodshed, but he can understand the desperation. “You are a man, Bjorn. That means doing what is right, no matter the consequences. Let me. Please.” Even so, it is hard to breathe through the heaviness in his chest. This time it is not smoke-tinged, it does not carry the iron taste of blood or the burn of rope against skin, only the panic-stricken sensation of a lack of air, of a throat closed against the inevitable rush of death. He doesn’t know how far he will be taken. He doesn’t know if he will survive this again.

Bjorn jerks his chin downward at last in hesitant permission. “Gyda is asleep again. You should go…” ‘say farewell’, is what lingers unsaid in the air between them.

But Athelstan plans for his farewell to prevent hers.

***

The town, when it slips up out of the landscape before them, looks at first like a mere spill of dark ink - a large stain at the end of a sparkling inlet and a series of droplets scattered out around it, spreading up the sides of long, gentle hills. But closer, details appear. In the centre is the Earl's Great Hall, with its frontage of towering wooden pillars holding up the gable, like the one in Kattegat. Around it - dropped in no particular pattern, are storehouses and workshops and homes, and on the hills, the field strips paint stripes of brown and yellow and green - a blanket woven with intricate colour that wrinkles up towards them as they walk.

Beside Athelstan’s slow, limping pace, Bjorn’s steps slow even further at the sight of it. A breeze carries the subdued hum of the ant-like crowd up from the bustling jetty and market. Athelstan lets his hand fall to his side, brushing his fingers through the long grass beside the rocky path. Stones dig into the soles of his feet - black with dirt from days of walking - but if he closes his eyes, he can imagine himself beneath a different sky, in the barley field behind the settlement, pressing the ears between his fingers to test for ripeness. Now, the grass is dry and sharp against fear-numbed fingertips, and the sound of it, scratching against his trousers, is a harsh, angry whisper.

"She will never forgive me for this, Athelstan." Bjorn almost whispers along with it. His voice is raw and rough, as if he has been crying, though Athelstan knows he hasn't, not even through the short, sleepless nights of their journey, spent staring up at the stars.

Up ahead, Sjurd passes a tall, carved pole that marks the boundary of the town and begins the descent past the fields towards the first little huts.

Athelstan reaches out and rests his hand on Bjorn's neck, curling his fingers over the curve his shoulder. Bjorn's skin is a furious red from too much sun and beginning to peel away where it meets the fluffy hairline. "She will understand." She will be angry first, at Bjorn and herself and at Athelstan. "But you will need to be her friend now since I cannot."

It seems only hours since Athelstan tucked Ulfkell's best blanket up around Gyda's sleeping face, her scarlet cheeks only drawing more attention to the yellowing tinge on the rest of her skin, and laid his new cross beneath her pillow where she will find it if— _when_ she wakes. He formed the _fe_ and the _yr_ in the English way, with downward-angled lines, with an arc and a cross, and he left the ending wrong because Gyda never had a chance to tell him - after all - why it was so. ‘ _Forgive me_ _’_. _Forgive me for leaving when I promised to stay_.

“I suppose I will have to find the time.” Bjorn tries on a smile that ends up more of a grimace. “Though, have you heard? Our slave is leaving for a better household, so I will be busy shovelling out the pig shit again.”

Athelstan manages the breath of a laugh and quiet drifts in, the chirruping of crickets in the meadow grass filling the spaces between their thoughts and the buzz of people below, until they come alongside the boundary pole and Bjorn's dragging pace slows to a complete stop. Athelstan leans against the pole - which raises Bjorn's eyebrows to an alarming height - and rubs at his knee.

Bjorn looks away - down the hill at Sjurd’s retreating back, then along the path and into the market square in front of the Great Hall. “We will come find you. It will not be for long. We will get you back.”

Athelstan nods. He has no doubt Bjorn means it now, but it will be winter soon, and Ragnar will have the law to administer and an earldom to master and the summer raids to organise before the men get restless and rebellious. Truly, the idea of Ragnar searching for him to rescue him from slavery is as ludicrous as the notion that King Aella might sail across the sea to do the same.

"I mean it." And now Bjorn's hand is on his shoulder, fingers pressing in around the bone. His palm is sweaty from hard walking, and the wet warmth of it soaks through the linen against Athelstan's skin. It is sticky and uncomfortable, but Athelstan does not even think to shrug it off. "I want you to swear an oath," and Bjorn doesn't wait for an assent before he continues, "that you will stay alive."

“I will do my best, Bjorn, but you know very well that I cannot swear to it.” His end may be short and terrifying and violent, like falling beneath Ulfkell’s boots, or it may be a slow, forlorn wasting, but it is inevitable.

“It’s an order, Priest.”

"I am not a Priest anymore." He left his duties behind at Lindisfarne, his habit and book at the farm, his cross to save Gyda's life. Twice. All he has left is his rope belt. And it is time now to lose that too. He takes it off and reties it, the way he watched Ragnar do it, though his fingers are clumsy and trembling, not firm and sure, into a loose loop at one end, large enough to slip his head through, and holds it out for Bjorn to take, along with the utility knife. Bjorn takes the knife, but scowls at the rope hanging limp in Athelstan's hand, the loop dangling like a noose, his bright blue eyes fierce beneath the tousled mess of his hair. Then his hand slips from Athelstan's shoulder, and he snatches that too, pressing the loop over Athelstan's head with a curl of disgust on his lips. It scrapes over the curls on the crown of Athelstan's head - all short and messy now after Ulfkell's careless shearing - and drops into place against the scar at the nape of his neck.

Bjorn sighs a long, harsh sigh and gives a gentle tug on the end of the rope. "Come on then, if you won't change your mind." He turns away, his face tightening into something approaching anger, his fingers squeezing on the filthy cords of the rope, and Athelstan limps after him, past the post and down onto the sandy path.

From below, the sounds of the market grow raucous. The shouts of stallholders announcing their wares and the lively voices of buyers in haggling debate merge into a tumult of noise with the cries of terrified, stinking animals. One of which Athelstan is about to become. And Bjorn's hand tightens still further on the rope, following Sjurd's weaving back now through the straggling edges of the crowd. Someone stands on Athelstan's bare foot, and he stumbles sideways into Bjorn's elbow, choking on the combined stench of sweat and spices, of fish and dung and blood.

Bjorn tugs the rope again, and it burns over the shiny skin of Athelstan's neck, pulling him down and closer to Bjorn's mouth. "This is your last chance," he hisses, "I cannot stop it once we've started. I cannot make a deal undone. If you're going to think up some better plan, you need to think now."

Athelstan swallows down the taste of fear that hangs in the air like a cloud. For the first time in a long, long time, he is absolutely sure of what he is doing. “This _is_ the better plan.”

Summer is fading, and Athelstan will fade with it. Soon the rains will turn to snow and that in turn to ice, and the land will sleep away its long and dreary winter. And when at last it wakes again, as from a half-forgotten dream, the children’s memory of him will be nothing more than a washed-out sorrow - a pencil line on a page, long painted over with the bright and beautiful colours of their own lives. They full of hope and wonder, he partly glimpsed in the shadows, invisible in the light.

_To be continued in book two_ _…_

**Author's Note:**

> [All rights for the Vikings TV show go to:  
> Octagon Films, Take 5 Productions, TM Productions, Shaw Media, Corus Entertainment, MGM TV, History Channel, and Michael Hirst.]


End file.
